Y-5 


THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 


THE  MARGIN  OF 
HESITATION 


BY 

FRANK  MOORE  COLBY 

// 

Author  of 

"IMAGINARY  OBLIGATIONS"   and   "CONSTRAINED 
ATTITUDES" 


NEW  YORK 
DODD.  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 

1921 


COPYRIGHT,  1921,  BY 
.    DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY,  INC. 


PRINTED  IN   THE   U.  S.  A. 


CONTENTS 

I  TROLLEY  CARS  AND  DEMOCRATIC  RAPTURES      2 

II  THINKING  IT  THROUGH  IN  HASTE 11 

III  THE  LANGUAGE  OF  FEMINIST  DEBATE.  ...     23 

IV  PLEASURES  OF  ANXIETY 48 

V  HATING   BACKWARDS 58 

VI  AFTER  THE  WAR  IN  THOMPSONTOWN  . . . .     71 

VII  INTERNATIONAL    CANCELLATION 85 

VIII  THE  LESSON  OF  LITERARY  WAR  LOSSES.  . .     93 

IX  ON  BEHALF  OF  HAROLD  MCCHAMBER 106 

X  SUBSIDIZING    AUTHORS 113 

XI  INCORPORATED   TASTE 119 

XII  BARBARIANS  AND  THE  CRITIC 126 

XIII  REVIEWER'S    CRAMP 135 

XIV  How  TO  HATE  SHAKESPEARE 145 

XV  CONFESSIONS  OF  A  GALLOMANIAC 154 

XVI  THE  CLASSIC  DEBATE 173 

XVII  THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS 189 

XVIII  TAILOR  BLOOD  AND  THE  ARISTOCRACY  OF 

FICTION  205 

XIX  OUR  REFINEMENT.  .  .213 


•J4i 


THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 


THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

TROLLEY-CARS  AND  DEMOCRATIC 
RAPTURES 

If  the  appearance  of  the  people  on  both  sides 
of  the  car  shakes  your  confidence  in  the  future  of 
democracy;  if,  while  your  eye  travels  along  those 
two  deadly  parallels  of  blank-featured  human 
latitude,  you  mutter  to  yourself,  "  Blood  will  tell, 
and  after  all  class  systems  are  necessary,"  and 
wonder  what  the  world  will  come  to  when  it  is 
left  to  the  plain  people,  such  exceedingly  plain 
people,  for  example,  as  those  five  awful  ones 
nearest  the  door;  and  if  you  feel  all  your  radical 
ism  oozing  out  of  you,  including  the  initiative 
and  referendum,  recall  of  judges,  short  ballot,  and 
proportionate  taxation  of  swollen  fortunes;  and 
if,  as  .six  more  of  them  get  in  each  with  a  face 
like  a  boiled  potato,  you  begin  to  distrust  the 
whole  foundation  of  popular  rights,  even  trial  by 
jury,  even  habeas  corpus;  if,  I  say,  this  sort  of 
thing  happens  to  you  now  and  again,  as  no  doubt 
it  does,  there  is  always  an  easy  means  of  con 
solation. 


THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 


Photographs  of  European  royal  families  were 
published  almost  every  week  during  the  war,  and 
can  be  obtained  from  the  files  of  the  newspaper 
supplements.  Clip  them  and  paste  them  properly 
and  they  will  cure  this  phase  of  democratic  melan 
choly.  I  have  here  a  set  of  Hapsburgs  whose 
faces  if  placed  side  by  side  would  be  as  desolating 
as  anything  ever  contemplated  in  the  subway. 
Line  a  trolley-car  with  these  Hohenzollern  heads 
(without  any  helmets  on  them,  naturally)  and  no 
one  would  suspect  the  presence  of  any  person 
above  the  rank  of  gasfitter.  He  would  merely 
suspect  that  the  car  was  headed  for  the  borough 
of  the  Bronx.  Add  to  the  rich  supply  of  wooden 
visages  in  the  various  branches  of  these  two 
families,  all  the  pudgy,  inane,  commonplace,  un 
pleasant,  or  commercial  countenances  possessed  by 
the  members  of  every  other  royal  or  ducal  dynasty 
for  the  past  century  or  two;  place  them  in  two 
rows  with  only  the  heads  showing,  and  you  will 
feel  as  you  would  feel  on  the  way  to  Coney 
Island  on  a  Sunday  afternoon,  except  perhaps  that 
you  will  miss  the  kingly  features  of  the  Long 
Island  railroad  conductor,  or  the  royal  bearing 
of  his  youthful  heir  apparent,  the  brakeman.  My 
own  collection  of  royal  personages — and  I  have 
no  reason  to  think  the  photographs  inaccurate  — 
makes  every  morning  subway  trip  seem  like  a 
royal  progress. 


TROLLEY  CARS  AND  RAPTURES      3 

But  though  reconciled  to  the  future  of  de 
mocracy,  including  that  of  the  people  in  the  sub 
way,  I  cannot  be  sanguine  about  it.  The  pleasures 
of  the  advanced  thinkers  who  assure  me  of  it 
are  denied  me.  I  never  have  any  luck  in  picking 
out  the  signs  of  the  times.  Even  when  I  do  suc 
ceed  in  catching  up  with  an  advanced  thinker  I 
never  share  that  bright  and  early  feeling.  For 
example,  I  once  got  abreast  of  a  man  much  ad 
mired  in  his  day  for  mental  forwardness.  I  for 
get  his  name,  but  recall  that  it  was  short  and 
energetic,  and  suited  to  this  Age  of  Steel — some 
thing  like  Chuggs,  I  think.  He  had  been  pent 
up  as  a  young  man  in  some  college  professorship, 
but  had  broken  away  and  was  lecturing  on  pro 
gress  along  all  the  principal  railways  of  the 
country. 

Professor  Chuggs  was  one  of  those  who  as 
sure  us  at  short  intervals  that  the  present  moment 
is  the  most  egregious  moment  of  the  most  egregi 
ous  year  of  the  most  egregious  century  that  "the 
world  has  ever  seen,"  and  that  the  next  moment 
will  be  more  egregious  still.  He  wrote  a  good 
many  of  those  articles  before  the  war  which  de 
clared  that  China  is  turning  over  in  her  sleep  and 
that  Persia  is  buzzing;  that  in  the  waste  places  of 
Africa  five  business  men  will  soon  be  blooming 
where  one  blade  of  grass  had  grown  before;  that 
through  the  mighty  arteries  of  commerce  the  life- 


4       THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

blood  of  civilization  is  coursing  to  the  extremities 
of  the  earth;  that  already  there  is  open  plumbing 
in  Patagonia  and  that  steam  drills  are  busy  in 
Tibet.  He  used  correctly  all  the  terms  employed 
in  his  business,  including  "giant  strides." 

His  magazine,  "The  On-Rush,"  which  was  de 
fined  in  a  sub-title  as  "A  Handbook  of  the  Coming 
Cataclysm,1'  announced  as  its  policy  the  avoidance 
of  conformity  with  "every  bourgeois  conception," 
which,  in  its  application  seemed  simple  enough; 
for  the  writers  had  merely  to  find  out  what  a  bour 
geois  conception  was,  and  then  take  a  flying  leap 
away  from  it,  no  matter  in  what  direction.  It 
opened  with  a  "Hymn  to  Moral  Rapidity,"  of 
which  one  stanza  ran,  as  I  remember,  something 
like  this : 

One  thought  in  the  bush  is  worth  two  in  the  head, 
And  a  dogma's  the  clutch  of  the  hand  of  the  dead ; 
So  pull,  pull  away  from  the  sands  of  Cathay, 
And  forge  to  the  forefront  and  strip  for  the  fray. 
Up  and  off  with  your  mind  in  the  morning. 

So  it  tossed  systems  of  philosophy  about  like 
bean-bags,  hit  off  each  classic  writer  in  a  phrase 
careless  but  final,  was  on  familiar  joking  terms 
with  all  the  sciences,  explained  woman,  silenced 
history  summed  up  everything  and  everybody — 
the  human  race,  the  fathers  of  the  church,  genius, 
love,  marriage,  and  the  future  state.  In  short, 


TROLLEY  CARS  AND  RAPTURES      5 

each  page  was  conscientiously  prepared  as  a  mus 
tard-plaster  to  draw  the  blood  to  some  unused 
portion  of  the  reader's  intellect. 

Yet  it  had  no  such  effect.  On  the  contrary, 
one  gathered  from  it  nothing  more  specific  or  ex 
citing  than  that  materialism  was  an  inadequate 
philosophy,  that  socialism  was  in  the  air,  that 
there  was  corruption  in  politics,  that  education 
did  not  educate,  and  that  marriage  was  a  good 
deal  of  a  bother.  Apparently  the  editor  and  con 
tributors  had  nerved  themselves  by  battle  songs 
into  repeating  these  common  remarks  of  the  tea- 
table,  all  in  a  tone  of  desperate  valor,  as  if  hourly 
expecting  each  one  of  them  to  be  their  last. 

I  suppose  there  must  be  "  new  thinkers"  in  this 
country,  and  that  they  must  sometimes  come  out 
on  the  news-stands.  Yet  a  "new  thinker,"  when 
studied  closely,  is  merely  a  man  who  does  not 
know  what  other  people  have  thought.  The 
"  new  thinker,"  if  I  may  attempt  a  definition  de 
rived  from  my  own  unfortunate  magazine  read 
ings,  is  a  person  who  aspires  to  an  eccentricity 
far  beyond  the  limits  of  his  nature.  He  is  a 
fugitive  from  commonplace,  but  without  the 
means  of  effecting  his  escape. 

Not  that  I  deny  the  approach  of  the  social 
revolution.  I  merely  say  that  since  the  social 
revolution  will  come  about  through  the  sort  of 
people  one  ordinarily  meets,  it  will  not  be  par- 


6       THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

ticularly  exciting.  This  extreme  excitement  of 
many  social  thinkers  over  the  people  one  ordi 
narily  meets  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  nature 
of  the  people;  it  is  a  free  gift  of  the  temperament 
of  the  thinkers  themselves. 

Possessed  of  this  light,  gay,  literary  disposition 
they  will  often  bubble  over  at  the  sight  of  persons 
and  objects  that  leave  almost  everybody  feeling 
rather  spiritless.  For  example,  an  American  so 
cial  thinker,  presumably  a  middle-aged  person 
and  living  in  one  of  the  most  prudent  portions  of 
New  England,  that  is  to  say  near  Mount  Tom 
in  the  state  of  Massachusetts,  can  become  ecstatic 
at  the  bare  thought  of  an  American  business  man. 
According  to  him  this  business  man  "plays  with 
the  earth  mightily,"  and  "  grasps  the  earth  and 
the  sky,  like  music."  Railroads  remind  this  social 
thinker  of  Heaven. 

Life  is  no  tangled  web  for  him,  nor  is  the 
world  in  the  slightest  degree  unintelligible.  War 
and  wickedness  and  all  that  sort  of  thing  used  to 
trouble  him  a  good  deal,  he  says,  but  that  was 
before  he  had  really  thought  them  out;  now  he 
feels  quite  comfortable  about  them.  What  is  the 
use  of  "puttering,"  he  says,  "theorizing,  historiciz- 
ing,  diplomatizing?"  Get  down  to  business  and 
look  humanity  in  the  eye.  People,  he  finds,  are  not 
so  bad  as  they  seem,  and  the  only  trouble  with 
them  is  that  living  in  a  machine  age  they  have  got 


TROLLEY  CARS  AND  RAPTURES      7 

caught  in  the  machinery.  The  way  out  of  it  is 
easy.  It  is  simply  a  matter  of  inspiring  million 
aire  business  men.  "The  inspired  millionaire  " 
surrounded  by  his  "  inspired  or  elated  labor  "  will 
soon  be  filling  the  world  with  the  "  awful,  beauti 
ful  resistless  tread  of  the  feet  of  the  men  of 
peace." 

Now  this  may  well  be  true.  Nobody  knows 
what  might  have  happened  already  if  Mr.  Mor 
gan,  or  the  Rockefellers  had  had  the  advantages 
of  Moses.  Or  take  a  simpler  case.  Suppose  the 
president  of  the  Boston  and  Maine  railway  passes 
a  night  alone  with  this  social  thinker  on  the  cloud- 
capped  summit  of  Mount  Tom  Massachusetts, 
and  comes  down  the  next  morning  with  eyes 
aflame.  He  returns  transfigured  to  his  office  and 
soon  the  inspiration  runs  all  along  the  line,  stock 
holders  dancing  and  praising  God,  trains  starting 
on  time  amid  Hosannas,  and  the  seven  devils  that 
are  in  every  baggageman  turned  into  swine  and 
drowned.  Sanctification  of  other  lines  soon  fol 
lows,  and  there  is  no  reason,  assuming  the  divine 
nature  of  the  guidance,  why  it  should  not  spread 
rapidly  throughout  the  world.  There  is  no  doubt 
that  by  inspiring  millionaire  business  men  suffi 
ciently  anything  can  be  done.  But  for  that  mat 
ter  inspiration  and  revelation  could  work  wonders 
through  almost  anybody — through  a  labor  leader 
as  well  as  through  a  millionaire.  Who  knows, 


8       THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

for  example,  whether  Samuel  Gompers  walking 
with  the  Lord  might  not  have  been  just  as  effica 
cious  as  John  Wanamaker  on  the  island  of  Pat- 
mos?  However,  it  is  unreasonable  to  look  too 
closely  into  this  matter.  The  main  point  is  the 
temperament  of  the  writer.  Exaltation  can  be 
had  by  him  on  easy  terms. 

On  the  other  hand  an  equally  talented  British 
visitor  on  encountering  the  "  average"  American 
business  man  was  recently  excited  in  a  directly 
opposite  way,  and  yet  almost  as  violently.  The 
business  man  is  always  the  same,  says  he,  "  from 
east  to  west,  from  north  to  south,  everywhere, 
masterful,  aggressive,  unscrupulous,  egotistic;" 
"  a  child  with  the  muscles  of  a  man;"  "  a  preda 
tory,  unreflecting,  naif,  precociously  accomplish 
ed  brute."  It  is  a  rare  man  to  whom  as  he 
travels  about  "  everywhere "  all  business  men 
will  seem  the  same.  It  springs  from  a  gift  of 
nature. 

Each  of  these  writers  ran  on  passionately  in 
this  manner  for  many  pages,  quivering,  ejaculat 
ing,  singing  snatches  of  a  psalm.  They  have 
"  watered  the  desert,"  says  the  American  admirer 
of  business  men,  and  "  thought  hundred  year 
thoughts,"  and  said,  "  Come "  to  empires  and 
"  Come  "  to  the  earth  and  sky.  "  Come,  earth 
and  sky,  thou  shalt  praise  God  with  us !  "  They 
are  the  "masters  of  methods  and  slaves  of 


TROLLEY  CARS  AND  RAPTURES      9 

things,"  says  the  British  rhapsodist,  and  "  there 
fore  the  conquerors  of  the  world." 

Such  are  the  blessings  of  this  buoyant  temper. 
For  us  rather  jaded  and  humdrum  persons  it  is 
impossible  to  regard  the  coal  man,  much  as  we 
dislike  him,  as  a  tiger,  or  to  feel  toward  the  rail 
way  station  as  toward  the  Holy  Sepulchre.  We 
too  crave  that  vision  of  the  Boston  and  Maine 
railroad  tipped  up  like  Jacob's  ladder  with  the 
shining  forms  of  presidents,  vice-presidents  and 
directors,  ascending  and  descending,  accompanied 
by  corporation  counsel.  And  it  would  give  a 
pleasant  spice  of  danger  to  our  daily  visits  to  the 
green  grocer,  could  we,  like  that  other  enthusiast, 
regard  him  as  a  jungle  beast. 

But  that  is  the  way  with  it.  Some  men  are  con 
demned  from  their  nativity  to  matter  of  fact, 
while  others,  surmounting  all  the  obstacles  of 
variety,  exception,  and  experience,  can  find  a 
"  type  "  or  a  u  superman,"  for  the  looking.  The 
term  "  business  man,"  like  the  term  "  biped,"  or 
"  homo  sapiens,"  leaves  us  cold  and  a  little  ab 
stracted,  but  in  the  writers  of  brisk  little  papers 
on  enormous  subjects,  this,  or  any  other  large, 
loose,  shapeless,  social  designation  will  often 
arouse  the  keenest  personal  feelings  and  implant 
the  stoutest  convictions.  They  can  get  gooseflesh, 
or  even  the  assurance  of  apocalypse,  from  the 
mere  contemplation  of  generic  expressions  which 


io     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

convey  no  emotion  whatever  to  any  of  the  rest  of 
us,  except  perhaps  that  of  being  a  little  at  sea. 

Finally  another  social  thinker  that  I  have 
recently  encountered  soars  far  away  from  the 
earthiness  of  these  conceptions,  far  away  from  the 
earth  itself,  and  looking  down  from  this  height 
on  its  misguided  populations,  thus  addresses  them: 
Begin  all  over  again,  he  says.  If  the  new  charter 
of  human  rights  does  not  re-create  everything,  it 
will  create  nothing  at  all.  Make  a  clean  sweep 
of  all  notions  imposed  from  without;  make  a  clean 
sweep  of  everything  bequeathed  to  you.  Away 
with  God,  church,  king,  priest,  ruling  class,  the 
aristocrat,  and  the  old-fashioned  republican,  the 
school  as  it  now  is,  privilege  of  every  sort,  chari 
ties,  inheritance  rights,  national  frontiers,  colonial 
power,  and  so  on  with  much  circumstance  as  to 
the  range  and  depth  of  this  damnation,  but  with 
no  information  as  to  the  ways  and  means  of  doing 
the  next  thing  that  remains  to  be  done  after  the 
damnation  is  achieved.  For  the  next  thing,  he 
insists,  is  this:  Be  the  people  of  peoples,  and  set 
up  at  once  the  universal  republic,  founded  on 
equality  and  justice.  And  he  is  just  as  elated  and 
just  as  sure  that  the  thing  will  be  readily  accom 
plished,  as  if  he  had  never  traveled  in  a  trolley 
car  and  never  looked  hard  at  the  sort  of  Utopian 
ingredients  that  all  trolley  cars  seem  forever  des 
tined  to  contain. 


THINKING  IT  THROUGH  IN  HASTE 

Though  often  entranced  by  that  brilliant  group 
of  cosmic  problem-solvers — Mr.  H.  G.  Wells, 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  and  others — I  insist  on  my 
personal  iresponsibility  for  the  state  of  Mankind 
as  a  whole.  These  men  are  much  too  busy  nursing 
civilization.  They  regard  it  as  a  sort  of  potted 
plant  which  they  fear  to  find  frost-bitten  of  a 
morning.  This  is  especially  clear  in  certain  writ 
ings  of  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  in  which  he  shows  an 
impatient  desire  to  tidy  up  the  whole  world  at 
once.  At  one  swoop  he  would  remove  the  shirts 
from  our  clothes-lines  and  the  errors  from  our 
rninds.  The  world  is  too  large  for  his  feather 
duster;  he  had  thought  to  find  it  a  smaller  planet 
that  he  might  have  kept  at  least  half-way  clean. 
Now  see  what  he  has  on  his  hands — everything 
in  a  mess,  Africa  backward,  China  careless,  the  sex 
relation  by  no  means  straightened  out,  socialism, 
imperialism,  industrialism,  planless  progressivism 
littering  up  things,  a  great  war  and  its  greater 
failure,  and  nobody  caring  a  rap — at  times  it 
seems  to  his  housewifely  spirit  almost  too  much 
for  one  person  to  manage.  And  then  that  infernal 

11 


12     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

human  diversity — slow  minds,  stupid  minds,  minds 
made  up  too  soon,  or  not  at  all,  closed  minds, 
tough  minds,  tender  minds — what  is  to  be  done 
with  them?  He  burns  to  do  something. 

In  one  of  his  books  he  describes  himself  in  fancy 
as  going  about  the  country  and,  with  the  keenest 
pleasure,  spearing  all  Anglican  bishops.  Though 
I  am  myself  a  stranger  to  the  sport,  I  believe  the 
pleasure  of  spearing  bishops  is  exaggerated.  For 
once  begun  it  must  lead  logically  to  a  daily  drudg 
ery  of  slaughter  among  the  great  crowds  of  folk 
who  are  not  intellectually  independent  or  morally 
daring — lead,  in  short,  to  the  massacre  of  those 
who  are  not  particularly  exciting,  a  large  task  and 
tedious,  owing  to  their  quantity. 

I  wonder  if  we  commonplace  persons  are  not 
right  after  all  in  a  certain  instinct  of  distrust  to 
ward  these  gifted  writers.  We  believe  implicitly 
in  their  fancies  and  not  at  all  in  their  facts.  We 
believe  in  the  world  they  have  invented  and  not 
in  the  world  they  have  observed;  and  we  distrust 
them  utterly  as  world-pushers.  The  signs  are 
plain — terribly  plain  sometimes — that  it  is  when 
they  have  the  smallest  notions  that  they  say  their 
largest  things. 

In  common  with  other  admirers  of  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells,  I  am  always  charmed  by  him  and  his 
heroes  when  they  are  thinking  things  out  and  see 
ing  things  through,  but  I  am  profoundly  disap- 


THINKING  IN  HASTE  13 

pointed  by  the  sort  of  thing  they  think  themselves 
into.  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  described  the  situation 
with  perfect  accuracy  a  few  years  ago  when  he 
represented  a  Wells  hero,  after  a  "lot  of  clear, 
steady,  merciless  thinking"  about  the  muddle  of 
the  universe,  as  finding  the  solution  in  the  "Pro 
visional  Government  of  England  by  Female 
Foundlings."  I  reproduce  a  passage  of  this  most 
righteous  parody,  which  is  based,  I  think,  on 
The  New  Macchiavelli: 

True,  there  was  Evesham.  He  had  shown  an  exceed 
ingly  open  mind  about  the  whole  thing.  He  had  at  once 
grasped  the  underlying  principles,  thrown  out  some 
amazingly  luminous  suggestions.  Oh  yes,  Evesham  was 
a  statesman,  right  enough.  But  had  even  he  really  be 
lieved  in  the  idea  of  a  Provisional  Government  of  Eng 
land  by  Female  Foundlings?  *  *  *  "You've  got  to 
pull  yourself  together,  do  you  hear?"  he  said  to  himself. 
"You've  got  to  do  a  lot  of  clear,  steady,  merciless  think 
ing,  now,  to-night.  You've  got  to  persuade  yourself  that 
Foundlings  or  no  Foundlings,  this  regeneration  of  man 
kind  business  may  be  set  going — and  by  you." 

This  is  not  in  the  least  unfair  when  you  consider 
Mr.  Wells's  exultant  discoveries  during  the  last 
half  dozen  years  or  so,  down  to  and  including  his 
recent  discovery  of  God.  Here  are  just  a  few 
of  the  problems  and  their  solutions: 

The  future  of  America :  This  to  his  mind  re 
quired  instant  settlement.  It  was  absurd  that 


i4    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

nobody  should  have  a  plan.  They  were  letting 
America  drift — that  is  what  it  amounted  to — 
and  he  simply  could  not  bear  the  thought  of  it. 
"Let  America  slide?"  said  he  to  himself  on  the 
way  over.  "Let  a  whole  continent  go  to  the  dogs 
just  for  the  lack  of  a  little,  clear,  straight,  beauti 
ful  thinking?  I  should  be  a  coward  if  I  shirked 
it."  The  solution  came  to  him  before  he  reached 
New  York  and  was  confirmed  in  a  conversation 
a  day  or  two  afterwards.  The  idea,  I  think,  was 
that  we  should  all  marry  negro  women,  so  far  as 
there  were  enough  of  them  to  go  around. 

What  is  humanity  as  a  whole  doing?  That  was 
another  question  which  everybody  was  dodging  at 
the  time  out  of  sheer  mental  indolence.  What  is 
the  nature  of  the  world  process?  His  hero  thinks 
it  out.  His  hero  "takes  high,  sweeping  views,  as 
larks  soar."  He  spends  five  years  in  South  Africa, 
two  years  in  Asia,  six  months  in  America,  and 
sketches  briefly  civilization  as  it  has  pottered  along 
in  all  those  continents.  "Pottered,"  that  is  the 
word  for  it.  For  what  is  civilization?  What  is 
it?  Why,  hang  it  all,  it's  a  "mere  flourish  out  of 
barbarism."  What  is  Bombay?  What  is  Cal 
cutta?  Mere  "feverish  pustules  on  the  face  of 
Hindustan."  Something  must  be  done  about  it. 
He  thinks  still  harder  and  at  length  it  flashes  on 
him — the  very  thing — why  had  he  not  thought  of 
it  before — a  plan  at  once  simple  and  vast,  a  plan 


THINKING  IN  HASTE  15 

that  was  immediately  practicable,  yet  of  enormous 

future  potentialities,  a  plan .  Well,  the  plan 

was,  I  believe,  the  incorporation  of  an  interna 
tional  book  concern  which  should  publish  the  best 
works  in  all  languages,  along  with  satisfactory 
translations. 

Then  there  was  the  whole  sloppy  subject  of  the 
British  Empire — King,  army,  colonies,  Parlia 
ment,  Church,  education,  London  Spectator,  and 
all  that.  A  pretty  mess  they  had  made  of  it,  and 
not  a  blessed  soul  paying  the  least  attention  to  it; 
so  another  Wells  hero  had  to  think  it  out.  "Why," 
said  he,  "the  Empire  and  the  monarchy  and  Lords 
and  Commons  and  patriotism  and  social  reform 
and  all  the  rest  of  it  is  silly,  SILLY  beyond 
words,"  and  the  hero  in  his  irritation  flung  him 
self  right  over  into  Labrador  to  think  it  out,  and 
finally,  after  weeks  of  cold,  hard,  bitter,  ruthless 
ratiocination,  he  cut  down  to  the  very  roots  of  it, 
and  he  emerged  from  Labrador  with  a  Plan.  The 
plan  consisted,  I  believe,  in  the  publication  of  a 
book  to  be  entitled  Limits  of  Language  as  a  Means 
of  Expression — title  subsequently  changed  to 
From  Realism  to  Reality. 

Another  hero  of  lark-soaring  mind  is  annoyed 
by  the  senseless  refusal  of  almost  everybody  to 
shape  his  life  in  such  a  manner  as  will  redound 
to  the  advantage  of  the  beings  who  will  people 
the  earth  a  hundred  thousand  years  from  now. 


1 6     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

A  plan  must  be  found.  The  thinking  required  is 
terrific,  but  he  does  not  flinch,  and  at  last  he  has  it. 
It  is  the  publication  of  a  magazine  called  the 
Blue  Weekly,  whose  motto  is  to  be  Love  and 
Fine  Thinking. 

Meanwhile,  aside  from  the  sweeping  of  his 
heroes,  Mr.  Wells  in  his  own  name  was  doing 
some  rather  brisk  chamber-work  about  the  uni 
verse.  He  let  in  the  light  on  the  labor  question, 
as  one  might  open  a  blind.  He  shot  his  mind  back 
to  the  twitching,  thrusting  protoplasm  of  the 
Carboniferous  slime  and  he  shot  it  forward  to 
the  final  man,  half-angel,  who  should  stand  on 
the  earth  as  on  a  footstool  and  stretch  his  hand 
among  the  stars,  and  he  delivered  a  lecture  on  that 
final  man  before  some  learned  body.  He  gave  a 
ship-shape  account  of  the  human  race  in  twenty 
pages  or  so,  seeing  it  through  the  ape-man  stage, 
barbarism,  and  civilization,  and  well  along  toward 
the  Great  Solution,  and  then  at  the  end  put  it  all 
into  a  diagram,  not  too  long  for  a  busy  man  to 
carry  in  his  pocketbook;  it  ran  from  complete 
savagery  all  the  way  to  the  great,  harmonious, 
happy  future  state,  and  it  was  only  about  five 
inches  long. 

Some  people  complain  that  a  Wells  hero  really 
does  not  think  at  all  but  merely  explodes  into 
fragments  of  periodical  literature.  I  cannot  see 
the  force  of  this  objection.  Of  course,  Mr.  Wells 


THINKING  IN  HASTE  17 

is  not,  in  the  austere  sense  of  the  term,  a  thought 
ful  person,  and  he  does  not  make  his  characters 
engage  in  any  such  dry,  lonely,  and  unpopular 
process  as  thinking.  If  he  did,  they  would  be 
quite  generally  repulsive.  But  he  does  somehow 
contrive  the  illusion  that  a  good  deal  is  going  on 
in  their  minds,  and  he  makes  them  spit  out  be 
tween  clenched  teeth  a  platitude  that  you  will  often 
mistake  for  an  astonishing  idea.  That  is  the 
measure  of  Mr.  Wells's  skill.  The  hero's  mind 
does  really  sometimes  seem  to  soar  over  the  whole 
of  civilization,  when  it  is  merely  coquetting  with 
last  month's  magazines. 

Analyze  the  conversation  in  a  Wells  novel,  and 
it  will  remind  you  sometimes  of  the  cumulative 
index  to  periodical  literature,  and  sometimes  of 
the  table  of  contents  of  a  text-book  on  geology; 
but  what  other  novelist  could  give  you  the  im 
pression  that  an  index  to  periodicals  was  a  fiery 
thing  or  that  a  geological  title-list  was  almost 
passionate?  I  for  one  surrender  instantly  to  the 
persuasiveness  of  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  and  when 
the  thoughts  come  red-hot  from  the  hero's  brain, 
they  almost  always  warm  me  up,  even  though  I 
have  met  them  months  before,  cold  and  clammy, 
in  some  magazine.  But  then  comes  that  awful 
moment  of  deflation,  when  the  hero  finally  thinks 
things  out — thinks  things  utterly  down  and  out — 
gets  what  he  is  after — the  great  solution  or  the 


1 8     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

great  keynote,  or  the  mighty  mission  that  is  pro 
portionate  to  the  mighty  measure  of  his  mind — 
and  the  solution  is  something  like  the  Endowment 
of  Maternity,  and  the  keynote  is,  perhaps,  God 
bless  our  home,  and  the  mission  is,  for  example, 
the  chairmanship  of  an  international  commission 
for  the  promotion  of  poultry  farming. 

It  is,  of  course,  exorbitant  to  demand  of  Mr. 
Wells  that  the  great  idea  when  once  attained  shall 
come  up  to  our  expectations,  but  he  might  at 
least  kill  the  hero  off  while  still  pursuing,  and 
never  let  him  bag  the  game.  It  is  unsportsman 
like  to  start  him  off  after  the  largest  sort  of 
scientific  moose,  and  then  have  him  end  up  by 
stealing  somebody's  magazine  farmyard  chickens. 
Something  of  this  sort  happens  in  a  good  many 
of  his  novels,  and  I  believe  it  results  from  his  too 
great  preoccupation  with  the  details  of  an  unim 
aginable  future  state. 

Out  of  an  apparently  impenetrable  past,  says 
Mr.  Wells,  science  has  reconstructed  the  mega 
therium,  and  he  swears  that  the  megatherium  is 
every  bit  as  real  to  him  as  any  hippopotamus  he 
has  ever  met  Why  then  is  it  not  possible,  he  asks, 
that  the  same  amount  of  scientific  energy  should 
ultimately  evoke  from  an  impenetrable  future  the 
creatures  that  shall  succeed  us  on  this  earth  ?  No 
body  approaching  science  by  way  of  Mr.  Wells 
can  deny  this  cheerful  possibility.  If,  from  the 


THINKING  IN  HASTE  19 

past,  science  can  produce  a  pre-horse  or  eohippus, 
it  may  of  course  call  up  from  the  future  an  after- 
horse  or  hystero-hippus,  if  it  has  not  already  done 
so,  and  if,  on  looking  back,  it  finds  the  ape-man  or 
pithecanthrope,  it  might  conceivably,  on  looking 
forward,  chance  on  one  of  Mr.  Wells's  angel-men, 
which,  in  its  mad  desire  to  raise  the  devil  with  the 
English  language,  it  would  call  either  an  angel- 
anthrope  or  an  anthropangeloid.  No  one  will  dis 
pute  the  point  with  Mr.  Wells. 

The  only  important  point  to  the  reader  is  what 
happens  to  Mr.  Wells  when  he  is  too  much  pre 
occupied  with  these  two  extremes.  However  real 
the  megatherium  may  seem  to  Mr.  Wells,  to  him 
the  hippopotamus  for  fiction's  purpose  is  infinitely 
better  company.  The  imagination  can  play  around 
a  hippopotamus  but  on  a  megatherium  it  can  only 
toil.  In  the  same  way,  owing  to  the  lack  of  a 
generally  understood  social  background,  ape-men, 
cave  men  and  the  like  are  always  failures  in  con 
temporary  novels,  and  half-angels  are  worse  still. 
Fiction  cannot  proceed  in  a  social  vacuum  and  the 
future  space  which  a  Wells  hero  thinks  himself 
out  into  is,  socially  speaking,  void. 

That  is  why  he  comes  back  so  empty-minded 
that  he  snatches  at  the  first  progressive-sounding 
magazine  title  he  finds.  It  is  unfortunate  that  a 
writer  who  can  deal  delightfully  with  actual 
human  beings  should  think  himself  clean  out  of  all 


20     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

relation  to  them.  In  s-everal  of  his  books  Mr. 
Wells  is  wholly  concerned  with  the  thinking  out, 
not  at  all  with  the  people  who  do  the  thinking. 
This  is  especially  true  of  a  certain  story  in  which 
a  bishop  finds  his  way  to  God.  It  is  not  important 
that  Mr.  Wells  does  not  make  the  bishop  see 
God  or  that  he  does  not  make  us  see  religion, 
but  it  is  important  that  he  does  not  make  us  even 
see  the  bishop.  We  do  not  mind  our  not  arriving 
anywhere  nearly  so  much  as  our  not  having  any 
company  on  the  way. 

I  confess,  however,  that  when  Mr.  Wells  is 
really  eloquent  about  his  Great  Solution,  no  mat 
ter  which  one  it  may  be,  he  is  apt  to  have  me  under 
his  thumb  for  hours.  Suppose,  for  example,  he 
should  become  very  much  excited  about  malted 
milk,  and  see  in  it  a  solution  of  every  problem 
that  now  troubles  society.  I  do  not  know  whether 
Mr.  Wells  has  as  yet  written  a  novel  on  malted 
miilk,  though  he  has  championed  other  causes  in 
his  fiction  that  did  not  at  first  sight  S'eem  to  me 
more  promising.  But  I  do  know  that  if  he  should 
write  a  novel  on  malted  milk,  it  would,  for  a  while 
at  least  fairly  sweep  me  off  my  feet.  I  should 
believe  that  malted  milk,  steadily  consumed 
through  the  ages,  on  and  on,  would  really  produce 
that  final  perfect  human  race  dreamt  of  by  the 
hero  of  the  narrative.  It  may  be  that  for  his 
wide  and  probably  painful  magazine  readings  he  is 


THINKING  IN  HASTE  21 

taking  an  ironical  revenge  and  that  these  Great 
Solutions  are  only  a  sort  of  practical  joke  on  his 
contemporaries.  In  that  case,  I  have  been  often 
taken  in. 

The  only  excuse  for  thus  singling  out  Mr.  Wells 
is  that  he  is  in  these  respects  representative.  Vast 
numbers  of  contemporary  humanitarian  writers 
never  rise  above  this  level  to  which  he  sometimes 
descends.  Moreover  this  body  of  writing  which 
has  obviously  not  taken  the  trouble  even  to  catch 
up  with  the  past  is  admired  on  the  singular  ground 
that  it  has  overtaken  the  future.  It  is  the  journal 
ism  of  prematurity. 

It  is  the  subject  or  the  occasion  of  those  breath 
less  articles  on  the  "modern  spirit"  and  the  way 
we  speed  along;  on  the  revolutions  of  taste  within 
a  decade;  on  the  terrific  onward  modern  plunges 
of  the  novelist  of  last  week;  all  written  by  excitable 
commentators  who  exclaim  with  astonishment  and 
sometimes  alarm  at  the  contemporaneousness  of 
their  contemporaries. 

But  it  is  well  known  that  these  audacities  and 
modernities  in  no  wise  account  for  the  hold  of  a 
book  on  the  attention.  Thoughts  just  as  bold  and 
newly  dated  have  often  put  us  fast  asleep.  In 
books  it  is  not  the  progress  that  is  exciting,  it  is 
the  person  you  are  progressing  with.  There  is 
not  a  day  without  its  prosy  iconoclasms,  when 
some  of  the  dullest  people  ever  known  will  blaze 


22     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

away  at  God,  government,  the  family,  and  the 
moral  sense  with  the  most  violent  intentions  and 
the  drowsiest  results.  When  the  ideas  are  all 
about  us  in  the  air  there  does  not  seem  any  great 
audacity  in  presenting  them.  It  seems  rather  like 
calmly  blowing  back  our  own  breath  into  our 
faces.  "Modernity"  is  an  accidental  quality  of  the 
books  to  which  I  have  referred,  having  no  more 
to  do  with  their  essential  worth  than  has  the  day 
of  the  month  on  which  they  were  printed.  Be 
cause  everything  is  swept  away  that  preceded  the 
date  of  publication,  and  to-day's  superstitions  are 
substituted  for  yesterday's  superstitions,  and  be 
cause  there  is  an  unaccountable  tendency  to  deify 
the  middle  of  next  week,  which  is  not  a  very  in 
teresting  object  of  worship,  it  does  not  follow  in 
the  least  that  it  is  a  modern  book.  It  does  not 
even  follow  that  it  is  in  any  essential  sense  a 
book  at  all.  Literature  does  not  stay  behind  with 
progress;  it  moves  along  with  experience. 


THE  LANGUAGE  OF  FEMINIST  DEBATE 

I  do  not  agree  with  certain  representatives  of 
Roman  Catholic  opinion  that  the  modern  sociolog 
ist  does  more  harm  than  good.  I  would  not  burn 
a  modern  sociologist  or  even  abolish  him,  if  I 
could.  Considering  him  as  an  indefatigable 
rodent  burrowing  among  the  roots  of  social  com 
plexities  that  he  cannot  understand,  I  rather  ad 
mire  him,  but  when  he  comes  to  the  surface  too 
soon,  as  he  often  does,  and  proclaims  enormous 
certitudes  as  to  the  soul  of  this  nation  or  that,  and 
as  to  the  direction  that  human  society  is  bound 
to  take,  I  should  like  to  get  him  back  into  his  hole 
again.  And  I  question  the  value  of  a  great  many 
of  his  biological  and  evolutionary  analogies.  Take 
the  man  who  some  years  ago  reached  the  con 
clusion  after  the  most  violent  sociological  endeav 
ors  that  the  average  politician  was  something  of 
an  ass.  Why  need  he  have  fought  his  way  to  such 
a  simple  consummation,  when  he  might  so  easily 
have  jumped  to  it?  Not  that  he  said  in  so  many 
words,  politicians  are  asses.  He  put  it  sociologic 
ally.  Party  cries  and  iterative  watchwords,  said 
he,  biologically,  psychologically,  and  sociologically 

23 


24    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

regarded,  are  modes  of  appeal  to  the  instincts 
of  the  herd,  inherited  from  remote,  probably  pre 
historic,  zoological  ancestors.  But  when  you  an 
alyze  this  it  comes  to  nothing  more  than  saying 
that  politicians  are  like  the  prehistoric  ass,  which 
adds  little  to  our  knowledge,  and  even  as  a  term 
of  abuse  is  not  much  more  effective. 

"The  scarlet  paint  and  wolf-skin  headdress  of 
a  warrior,  or  the  dragon  mark  of  a  medicine  man, 
appeal,  like  the  smile  of  a  modern  candidate, 
directly  to  our  instinctive  nature." 

I  see  no  value  in  this  discovery.  Had  soci 
ology  never  been  invented  I  should  have  known 
that  the  dragon-mark  of  a  medicine  man  wa^>  oven 
more  primitive  in  its  appeal  than  the  smiles  of 
comparatively  ancient  types  of  presidential  candi 
dates. 

Laughter,  he  went  on  in  his  strange  thoughtful- 
ness,  laughter  occurs  sometimes  in  political  life, 
but  sociologically  considered  it  is  "comparatively 
unimportant."  Nevertheless  let  us  consider  it 
bio  gene  tic  ally: 

"It  may  have  been  evolved  because  an  animal 
which  suffered  a  slight  spasm  in  the  presence  of 
the  unexpected  was  more  likely  to  be  on  its  guard 
against  its  enemies,  or  it  may  have  been  the  merely 
accidental  result  of  some  fact  in  our  nervous 
organization  which  was  otherwise  useful." 

Why  all  these  sociological  hypotheses  of  laugh- 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  25 

ter?  My  own  hypothesis  is  just  as  good:  Laugh 
ter,  I  contend,  is  nothing  more  than  an  attenuated 
hiccough,  pleasurably  reminiscent  of  the  excesses 
of  our  ancestors.  Sociologists  can  never  let  laugh 
ter  alone,  though  you  would  think  it  was  the  last 
thing  they  would  want  to  bother  with.  There 
was  one  of  them  the  other  day  who  after  a  patient 
study  of  Aristotle's  Portico,  Bergson  on  Laughter, 
Bain  on  the  Emotions  and  the  Will,  Kuno  Fischer 
in  "Ueber  den  Witz,"  Cicero  on  Oratory,  Stanley 
Hall  on  "The  Psychology  of  Tickling,  Laughter, 
and  the  Comic"  and  some  twenty  other  authorities, 
came  to  the  conclusion  that  "Laughter  at  any  rate 
is  highly  relaxing,"  but  as  this  seemed  a  little  too 
informal,  he  hastened  to  express  it  as  a  "pyscho- 
genetic  law."  "Laughter,"  said  he,  "is  one  of 
the  means  which  nature  has  provided  to  preserve 
psychic  equilibrium  and  prevent  more  serious  out 
breaks."  In  its  former  state  no  one  would  have 
noticed  this  remark,  and  now  it  has  become  a 
sociological  law,  highly  prized,  I  believe,  in  seri 
ous  quarters.  One  never  can  tell  the  sociological 
possibility  of  some  little  thing  that  seems  hardly 
worth  the  saying.  Thus  if  you  say,  he  swears 
like  a  pirate,  you  are  not  sociological.  But  sup 
pose  you  pull  yourself  together  and  say:  Pro 
fanity  in  that  it  relaxes  the  inner  tension  by  a 
sudden  nervous  discharge  and  offers  a  means  of 
escape  from  social  inhibitions,  is,  when  phylo- 


26     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

genetically  considered,  nature's  method  under  the 
conditions  of  modern  civilized  life  of  providing 
an  outlet  for  primitive  emotions  which  in  an  earlier 
period  were  apt  to  take  more  socially  injurious 
forms,  such  as  piracy.  You  will  then  be  taken 
for  a  sociologist.  I  do  not  say  you  will  really  be 
a  sociologist,  but  you  will  look  like  one,  especially 
if  you  add  a  bibliography. 

Sociology,  as  I  have  lately  seen  it  streaming 
from  the  press,  seems  to  consist  of  two  main  varie 
ties.  There  is  the  sort  above  mentioned  that  tells 
in  a  strange  language  what  everybody  knows  al 
ready.  You  recognize  your  own  thoughts,  though 
terribly  disfigured.  Then  there  is  the  full-winged 
or  apocalyptic  kind  that  tells  you  what  nobody 
ever  could  know.  This  is  the  sort  that  sweeps  the 
heroes  of  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  off  to  Labrador  or 
India  in  order  to  think  out  civilization,  and  that 
propelled  an  excellent  French  sociologist,  during 
the  war,  straight  through  the  soul  of  the  entire 
German  people. 

But  I  am  here  concerned  especially  with  the 
effect  of  social  studies  upon  the  language  of  fem 
inist  controversy.  I  recall,  for  example,  a  solid 
treatise  greatly  admired  in  its  day,  written  by  a 
German  woman  of  enormous  industry.  Toward 
nonsense  in  all  its  forms  she  maintained  an  attitude 
of  extraordinary  seriousness.  She  did  not  even 
call  it  nonsense,  but  enveloped  it  in  scientific-sound- 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  27 

ing  terms  that  made  it  seem  quite  dignified.  Let 
Michelet  remark  in  a  thoughtless  moment,  "You 
must  create  your  wife — it  is  her  own  wish,"  and 
she  straightway  defined  it  as  a  "subjective  erotic 
fantasy."  Some  of  the  simplest  and  most  familiar 
types  of  men  disappeared  beneath  her  Greek  de 
rivatives.  For  example,  there  was  he  who  swag 
gers  a  good  deal  in  his  own  household  and  is 
"tame  and  feeble"  everywhere  else — he  who  for 
all  ordinary  purposes  might  with  perfect  adequacy 
be  termed  a  silly  sort  of  man.  This  simple  defini 
tion  by  no  means  contented  her.  She  said  he 
"experiences  a  dyscrasy,"  and  that  "between  his 
sexual  life  and  his  career  as  a  citizen  there  exists 
a  latent  contradiction  which  secretly  is,  perhaps, 
as  great  a  trial  to  him  as  to  the  wife  who  is  de 
pendent  on  him."  A  licentious,  domineering  man, 
a  weak,  passive,  crafty,  false,  or  ludicrous  woman, 
is  an  acratic  person — that  is  to  say,  a  "partially 
developed  being  whose  whole  personality  is  deter 
mined  by  teleological  sex  characteristics."  They 
are  exponents  of  "centrifugal  sexuality."  On  the 
other  hand,  persons  like  the  Christian  saints  are 
iliastric,  "the  highest  type  of  centripetal  sexual 
ity."  Better  still  are  the  synthetic  folk  whose 
sexuality  is  an  equilibrium  of  the  centrifugal  and 
the  centripetal  sexual  tendency.  She  seemed  to 
have  caught  some  bad  verbal  habit  from  almost 
every  science  she  had  studied,  but  she  had  no 


28     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

doubt  suffered  the  most  from  sociology.  Take, 
for  example,  the  simple  and  familiar  precept  that 
women  should  advance  in  morality  and  intelligence 
so  far  as  possible  without  shattering  the  outward 
decencies.  What  mind  uncorrupted  by  the  social 
sciences  would  conceal  it  under  this? 

To  emancipate  oneself  from  the  ethical  normative  of 
femininity,  which  fetters  individuality  because  of  the 
teleological  limits  of  sex,  is  a  distinct  right.  But  to  pre 
serve  its  formal  quality  is  the  task  of  a  free  personality. 

There  was  one  good  result,  however,  from  her 
excessive  industry.  She  did  some  excellent  de 
structive  work  on  the  subject  of  Woman  in  Gen 
eral.  Many  pages  of  her  arguments  may  be 
summed  up  in  the  single  and  apparently  sound 
thesis  that  Woman,  with  a  capital  letter,  is  a  myth, 
and  that  only  women  are  realities.  After  a  care 
ful  study  of  men's  general  statements  about 
Woman  she  concluded  that  Woman  is  merely  a 
"subjective  fetish  of  sex,"  having  no  existence  out 
side  the  brain  of  the  thinker.  She  made  the  fol 
lowing  collection  of  the  foolish  and  contradictory 
remarks  of  the  thinkers:  There  is  Lotze  saying 
that  "the  female  hates  analysis"  and  therefore 
cannot  distinguish  the  true  from  the  false.  There 
is  Lafitte  saying  that  "the  female  prefers  an 
alysis."  There  is  Kingsley  calling  her  "the  only 
true  missionary  of  civilization,"  and  Pope  calling 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  29 

her  a  rake  at  heart;  Havelock  Ellis  saying  that 
she  cannot  work  under  pressure,  and  Von  Horn 
saying  that  in  the  fulfilling  of  heavy  requirements 
she  puts  a  man  to  shame;  M.  de  Lambert  that  she 
plays  with  love;  Krafft-Ebing  that  her  heart  is 
toward  monogamy;  Brissac  that  usouls  have  no 
sex,"  Feuerbach  that  they  have;  Laura  Marholm 
that  "the  significance  of  woman  is  man,"  Frau 
Andreas  Salome  that  woman  is  one  "who  en 
deavors  to  realize  an  ever  broader,  ever  richer 
unfolding  of  her  innate  self;"  Havelock  Ellis  that 
nervous  irritability  has  ever  been  her  peculiar 
characteristic;  Mobius  that  women  are  "strongly 
conservative  and  hate  all  innovation;"  Hippel  that 
"the  spirit  of  revolution  broods  over  the  female 
sex;"  Lecky  that  woman  is  superior  both  in  in 
stinctive  virtues  and  in  those  which  arise  from  a 
sense  of  duty;  Lombroso  that  there  is  "a  half- 
criminaloid  being  even  in  the  normal  woman;" 
Bachhofer  that  "Law  is  innate  in  women;"  and 
von  Hartmann  that  the  whole  sex  is  unjust  and 
unfair. 

This  seems  a  fair  illustration  of  the  condition 
of  men  when  they  write  about  Woman.  In  con 
temporary  writings  their  state  is  even  worse.  In 
reading  all  the  little  papers  on  this  giant  theme 
I  have  often  wondered  what  it  is  that  so  balloons 
Man's  thoughts  of  Woman  just  when  he  is  about 
to  print  an  article  and  at  no  other  time — the  sort 


30     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

of  man  who  could  not  fathom  a  single  concrete 
personality.  Why  this  mad  rush  of  certainties 
with  Man  and  Woman  and  Marriage  and  Society 
and  God  and  Cosmos  crammed  into  nutshells  and 
all  dispatched  in  about  five  thousand  words.  By 
what  apocolocyntosis  or  pumpkin-change  should 
the  head  of  a  journalistic  comprise  of  a  sudden  a 
"Female  Cosmos"  merely  because  he  wants  to 
write  an  article?  By  what  miraculous  distention 
was  an  entire  Superwoman  squeezed  into  the  tight, 
three-cornered  intellect  of  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw? 
For  some  of  the  most  charming  writers  of  our  day 
seem  subject  to  this  strange  inflation.  Woman, 
the  Female  Cosmos,  "vast,  broad,  universal,  and 
liberal;  "Woman,  the  Superwoman,  "ever  pursu 
ing  Man  at  the  behest  of  the  Life  Force" — what 
in  the  world  is  any  middle-sized  intellect  to  do 
about  her?  One  thing  is  certain:  There  is  no 
possible  chance  of  disproving  anything  that  the 
light  literary  character  who  invents  her  may  have 
chosen  to  lay  at  her  door.  Refutation  in  this  airy 
region  is  impracticable.  Yet  no  matter  how  frivol 
ous  the  writer  may  be,  some  feminist  attempts 
the  refutation. 

A  few  years  ago,  for  example,  some  harmless 
professor  of  biology  let  his  mind  sweep  from  the 
feminine  germ  cell  all  the  way  down  to  Mrs.  Pank- 
hurst,  and  filled  a  page  of  a  Sunday  newspaper 
with  guesses  as  to  Woman's  place  in  nature,  in 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  31 

human  history,  and  throughout  all  future  time. 
For  aught  a  finite  mind  could  tell,  they  may  have 
been  good  guesses,  but  it  is  not  likely  that  even 
the  professor  himself  had  any  deep  conviction  that 
in  so  large  and  blank  a  matter  he  was  guessing 
right;  he  was  thinking  rather  of  filling  that  page 
of  the  newspaper.  Yet  his  words  were  taken 
seriously  at  the  time,  and  several  women  writers 
are  even  now  rebuking  him  for  his  "views," 
though  I  am  sure  he  was  guiltless  of  holding  any. 
Nobody  has  any  "views"  on  the  subject  of 
Woman.  When  a  man  begins  a  sentence  with  the 
word  "Woman"  you  may  at  all  times,  everywhere, 
blame  him  for  the  beginning,  but  you  have  no 
right  to  quarrel  with  any  way  in  which  he  may 
choose  to  let  it  end.  Yet  to  these  careless,  large 
assertions  women  retort  seriously,  even  bitterly, 
and  will  often  toil  with  might  and  main  at  their 
refutation. 

Once,  for  example,  the  woman  suffragists 
throughout  this  country,  stung  by  the  taunt  that 
they  had  lost  the  cunning  art  of  domesticity, 
plunged  into  the  wildest  household  activities.  For 
weeks  they  sewed  things  by  hand,  boiled  them, 
and  put  them  up  in  jars,  and  when  they  were 
finished  threw  them  all  into  a  public  building  in 
New  York  City  and  dared  the  world  to  come  and 
see.  It  was  to  show  that  despite  their  strength 
of  mind  they  had  not  lost  their  womanhood — in 


32     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

reply  to  some  magazine  article  whose  writer  had 
long  since  forgotten  what  he  said. 

And  there  was  one  point  especially  on  which  all 
argument  was  thrown  away.  There  was  no  use 
in  trying  to  reason  a  hominist  out  of  his  profes 
sional  timidity.  When  he  said,  as  his  wont  was, 
at  short  intervals,  that  he  feared  the  neglect  of 
home  and  husband  if  women  voted,  it  would  have 
been  wiser  to  take  no  notice.  Whenever  the  hom 
inist  quoted  his  St.  Paul  and  cited  those  cherished 
examples  from  history — Penelope,  Griselda,  Ruth, 
Boaz,  and  the  bride  of  Peter  the  Pumpkin-eater — 
there  was  always  a  retaliatory  article  instancing 
powerful  and  public-spirited  women  of  to-day  who 
in  spite  of  everything  had  retained  their  woman 
hood. 

This  very  laborious  repartee  was  unnecessary. 
The  husband  marooned  in  a  kitchen  with  his  wife 
off  voting  all  day  long,  was  not  an  image  that 
haunted  us  greatly  in  our  daily  lives,  vivid  as  it 
seemed  in  the  pages  of  certain  essayists.  Taking 
American  husbands  as  they  were  this  was  never 
a  natural  anxiety.  The  chief  task  of  the  woman 
suffragists  in  this  country  was  to  prove  that  women 
had  interest  enough  in  politics,  not  to  allay  the 
fear  that  they  might  have  too  much. 

Times  have  changed,  and  politics  may  now  be 
discussed  even  at  the  womanly  woman's  hearth 
stone,  but  it  ought  always  to  be  remembered  that 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  33 

we  owe  to  the  advancing  woman,  terrible  as  she 
was,  this  emancipation  of  the  American  male.  It 
was  not  the  rule  in  the  American  household  that 
the  man  repressed  the  woman's  political  aspira 
tions;  on  the  contrary  he  generally  encountered 
the  sternest  feminine  opposition  to  any  full  ex 
pression  of  his  own. 

For  a  long  period  there  were  few  American 
husbands  who  in  their  own  families  dared  to  be 
as  political  as  they  wished.  Looking  back  on  that 
grim  domestic  tyranny  of  the  cold  shoulder  and 
the  absent  mind,  the  yawn,  the  interruption,  the 
glazing  eye,  the  sudden  vanishings  in  the  midst 
of  sentences  really  eloquent,  who  can  picture  the 
American  man  as  trying  to  keep  women  from  get 
ting  into  politics  ?  They  were  all  so  obviously  try 
ing  to  keep  politics  from  getting  out  of  him. 

This  practical  side  of  the  matter  was  once 
summed  up  by  a  friend  whose  point  of  view  rather 
appealed  to  me.  "In  regard  to  woman,"  said  he, 
"I  have  no  sympathy  whatever  with  anti-feminist 
fears  of  the  neglect  of  the  family.  If,  with  the 
march  of  mechanical  improvement,  housekeeping 
grows  easier,  what  is  to  be  done  with  the  released 
housekeeping  force?  Turn  it  back,  say  the  anti- 
feminists  to  the  expanding  woman,  and  house- 
keep  more  fiercely.  Let  that  great  managing  tal 
ent  which  once  ranged  from  corn-field  to  nursery, 
rocked  the  cradle,  smoked  the  ham,  reaped,  spun, 


34     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

milk,  stewed,  chopped,  and  sewed  up  everybody, 
wreak  itself  on  one  man,  two  children,  five  rooms, 
and  a  bath. 

"Think  of  the  households  in  which  domesticity 
boils  in  its  too  narrow  channel  with  a  dispropor 
tionate  force,  the  souls  which  go  out  into  wall 
paper,  the  excesses  of  conjugal  scrutiny  and  child- 
care,  the  surplus  anxieties,  the  many  needless 
strenuosities  of  wedded  life.  An  active-minded 
married  woman  in  these  days  without  outlet  is 
bound  to  overdo  her  marriage.  Suppose  you  mar 
ried  a  very  efficient  person,  and  the  only  object  of 
that  efficiency  were  you.  Take  a  woman  of 
marked  executive,  though  latent,  ability — a  woman 
who  might  have  been  Zenobia  if  she  had  had  the 
chance.  Would  you,  in  a  small  suburban  home, 
care  to  be  Zenobia's  Palmyra?  Anti-feminists  in 
cluding  a  large  body  of  sentimental  epigram 
matists  have  had  much  to  say  of  the  home  as 
woman's  kingdom  and  the  sanctity  of  woman's 
sphere.  But  would  any  one  of  them  wish  to  be 
a  woman's  sphere?  Husbands  of  able  but  old- 
fashioned  wives  are  worn  to  the  bone  by  their 
wives1  unduly  limited  activities.  They  would 
gladly  see  their  feminine  forces  dissipated." 

"The  main  danger,  as  I  see  it,"  he  went  on,  "is 
that  they  will  not  be  sufficiently  dissipated.  I  am 
afraid  of  the  great  pressure  of  released  mother- 
power  upon  purely  personal  affairs.  In  the  politi- 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  35 

cal  domain,  if  anyone  tells  me  that  women,  now 
that  they  have  the  ballot,  will  vote  more  foolishly 
t)han  men,  I  can  reply  tranquilly  that  that  is  incredi 
ble.  In  the  economic  domain,  if  anyone  tells  me 
that  the  average  woman  is  not  fit  for  the  large  re 
sponsibilities  of  business  enterprise,  I  can  reflect 
comfortably  that  there  is  nothing  whatever  in  the 
modern  world  to  show  that  the  average  man  is, 
either.  In  both  of  these  fields  moreover,  the  great 
feminine  innovation  is  already  so  well  along  that 
nobody  will  be  startled  much  by  the  further 
steps  that  it  will  take.  But  when  it  comes  to 
the  personal  domain,  my  mind  is  less  adequately 
prepared,  and  in  some  respects  unreconciled. 
There  is  a  hard  reasonableness  about  women  in 
all  matters  that  pertain  to  health  and  ruthless  hy 
giene  is  pretty  sure  to  sweep  over  the  community  in 
the  long  run  if  their  will  prevails.  Owing  to 
certain  dispositions  into  the  details  of  which  it  is 
not  now  necessary  to  enter  the  duties  of  mother 
hood  under  the  new  regime  will  be  considerably 
reduced.  Great  quantities  of  mother-power  thus 
released  will  be  poured  into  the  public  life  where 
it  will  take  the  form  of  health  control,  minute, 
inquisitorial  and  all-embracing." 

"A  single  woman  can  often  make  a  man  uncom 
fortable  by  the  application  of  her  cool  reason  to 
his  irregularities  in  food,  drink,  underclothing, 
getting  up  and  going  to  bed.  In  the  new  regime 


36     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

every  adult  citizen  will  probably  be  exposed  to  the 
equivalent  of  one  hundred  units  of  mother-power. 
A  certain  warm  casualness  that  is  promised  in  the 
domain  of  the  sexual  relations  does  not  in  my 
opinion  offset  the  icy  regularity  of  the  tobacco- 
less,  wineless,  physiologically  matronized  state 
which  is  indicated  by  the  most  advanced  and 
thoughtful  leaders  of  the  movement. 

"I  may  learn  in  time  to  flit  from  concubine  to 
concubine  as  a  matter  of  course,  as  is  earnestly  de 
sired  by  an  Austrian  feminist.  But  of  what  use 
is  this  element  of  variety,  if  every  moment  of  my 
life  is  under  the  merciless  scrutiny  of  the  Inquisi- 
tress-General  of  Diet,  the  Women's  Eugenical 
Board,  the  Committee  on  Private  Life  Inspection, 
and  the  Bureau  of  Sanitary  Propagation.  I  am 
perfectly  willing  to  renounce  that  attitude  of  pro 
tection  toward  woman  which  her  leaders  denounce 
as  the  expression  of  a  slave  morality,  but  I  am 
somewhat  concerned  by  the  amount  of  real  pro 
tection  she  is  threatening  to  bestow  on  me.  One 
gathers  from  recent  literature  not  merely  that 
mother-right  is  coming  into  its  own.  One  gathers 
that  mother-right  is  coming  into  almost  every 
thing.  But  that  may  be  merely  intentional  over 
statement  in  order  to  startle  one  into  paying 
attention,  just  as  a  suffragette  used  to  break  the 
windows." 

As  to  breaking  windows,  by  the  way,  who  could 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  37 

blame  woman  for  answering  wildly  to  the  confused 
arguments  that  were  brought  to  bear  upon  her? 
Any  one  who  can  recall  the  incoherencies  of 
woman  suffrage  argumentation  must,  I  think,  ad 
mit  that  however  mad  the  suffragists  seemed,  the 
opposing  hominists  seemed  even  madder.  It  may 
well  be  that  suffragettes  went  insane  in  an  honest 
endeavor  to  meet  insane  objections.  When  they 
threw  pepper  on  a  statesman  perhaps  it  was  de 
signed  as  an  answer  to  some  such  anti-suffrage 
argument,  as  "Woman  is  a  capsule  covering  empti 
ness  alone.  Only  man  can  make  it  full."  It  does 
not  seem  a  reasonable  answer,  but  then  I  cannot 
imagine  what  a  reasonable  answer  would  be,  and 
a  normal  mind  might  be  dislocated  in  finding  one. 
It  was  not  easy  to  follow  a  woman's  reasoning 
when  she  smashed  a  statesman's  hat  in,  tore  his 
buttons  off,  burned  buildings,  broke  glass,  ripped 
Bellinis  and  threw  apples  at  everybody,  and  as 
arguments  they  seemed  irrelevant  to  the  question 
of  the  suffrage.  But  it  was  no  easier  to  follow  the 
hominist  when  he  exploded  after  his  own  manner 
in  generalities.  Indeed,  the  missiles  of  the  mili 
tants  seemed  more  applicable  to  human  affairs 
than  did  the  hominist's  enormous  certainties  about 
Woman  as  the  supreme  being,  holding  up  the 
universe  amidst  the  "poetry  of  the  pots  and  pans;" 
Woman  as  the  universal  principle  of  Thrift; 
Woman  as  the  Queen  Elizabeth  who  decides 


38     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

"sales,  banquets,  labours  and  holidays;'*  Woman 
as  the  Aristotle  who  teaches  "morals,  manners, 
theology,  and  hygiene. " 

I  do  not  wonder  that  women  became  confused 
when  they  read  these  things  and  replied  with  ob 
jects  equally  relevant  and  considerably  more  con 
crete.  When  a  learned  and  entertaining  writer 
took  a  long  breath  and  called  a  suffragist  "a  jade, 
a  giantess,  a  Hanoverian  rat,  a  San  Jose  scale, 
a  noxious  weed,  and  a  potato  bug;"  when  another 
still  more  profound  person  declared  that  women 
do  their  thinking  in  "henids,"  whilst  uin  man  the 
henids  have  passed  through  a  process  of  clarifica 
tion"  and  that  uthe  very  idea  of  a  henid  forbids 
its  description;  it  is  merely  a  something" — I  am 
not  surprised  that  the  individual  mentioned  was 
somewhat  haphazard  in  her  replies. 

I  do  not  maintain  that  throwing  a  cabinet  min 
ister  downstairs  is  either  so  desirable  or  so  inter 
esting  as  the  essays  of  the  brilliant  and  well-known 
hominists  from  which  I  have  quoted.  I  merely 
contend  that  it  is  just  as  reasonable. 

Sex-patriots  are  indeed  a  fierce  folk,  be  they 
feminists  or  hominists,  and  they  have  no  patience 
with  people  who  in  a  modest  bewilderment  re 
frain  from  taking  sides.  That  is  why  the  usual 
treatise  on  "Woman,  Her  Cause  and  Cure,"  con 
tains  so  little  for  us  outsiders.  It  is  intended  as 
a  missile  for  the  contrary-minded,  not  as  a  message 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  39 

to  those  who  have  not  yet  made  up  their  minds. 
Is  Woman  that  supreme  being  whose  "two  strong 
arms  are  the  pillars  that  sustain  the  universe"  or 
is  she  that  "capsule  covering  an  emptiness  which 
man  alone  can  fill?"  There  is  the  naked  choice. 
Writers  on  Woman  would  think  it  base  to  hesi 
tate.  And  they  are  angry  if  you  try  to  pin  them 
down  to  the  particulars  of  actual  experience. 
Writers  on  Woman  hate  to  be  pinned  down  to 
anything.  It  is  a  leaping  kind  of  competition  be 
tween  feminists  and  hominists  and  each  side  thinks 
nothing  of  taking  six  centuries  at  a  dash.  Up- 
in-the-air  habits  have  been  formed  in  consequence. 
But  on  the  whole  I  think  the  hominist  cut  the  sor 
rier  figure  in  the  great  debate.  The  nature  of 
actual  women  seemed  never  to  have  entered  his 
mind.  Once  visited  perhaps  by  Ruth,  Penelope, 
or  some  female  relative  since  deceased,  his  mind 
was  now  deserted  save  for  a  few  mottoes  and  the 
rush  of  the  wind  in  empty  spaces. 

There  was  one,  some  years  ago,  the  spirit  of 
whose  writings  admirably  typified  his  kind.  He 
was  a  man  of  stern  and  ancient  faiths,  a  believer 
in  early  woman,  and  compulsory  charm,  alter 
nately  angry  and  alarmed  over  the  needless 
changes  since  the  time  of  Homer.  He  said  women 
were  sterile  and  dying  out;  also  that  they  were 
deadly  vermin  always  multiplying.  Sometimes  a 
woman  seemed  to  him  a  little  weed  soon  to  be  up- 


40     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

rooted;  at  others  he  would  shrink  from  her  as 
from  a  boa  constrictor.  Again  he  would  describe 
her  as  a  rat.  Epithets  that  seemed  to  destroy  one 
another  were  seized  by  him  apparently  in  the  hope 
that  they  would  destroy  her.  Each  sentence  re 
garded  by  itself  was  vigorous  and  interesting,  and 
even  seemed  to  have  a  meaning  when  you  forgot 
the  sentences  that  went  before. 

Great  is  the  glory  of  that  woman,  he  said,  who 
is  not  talked  of  for  good  or  evil,  who  hath  a  veil 
upon  her  head,  who  vaunteth  not  herself, — she 
that  is  meek,  and  is  not  puffed  up,  and  walks  in 
quietness,  and  is  mysterious,  and  suffers  long.  He 
chose  as  models  Helen,  Briseis,  Penelope,  Arete, 
Clytemnestra,  Chloris,  and  a  few  others  from  the 
Greeks,  and  three  from  the  Bible,  and  he  said  that 
women  had  since  then  degenerated.  To-day,  he 
said,  all  women  were  like  udogs  in  a  dance,"  and 
the  veil  was  rent  and  woman  was  ashamed.  He 
first  proposed  as  a  remedy  that  the  right  kind  of 
woman  should  fall  in  a  cold-blooded  virgin  fury 
upon  the  sugar-mouthed  idle  kind  who  lived  within 
melliferous  walls.  But  in  another  mood  he  found 
this  inadequate  and  declared  that  the  only  desir 
able  form  of  society  was  that  in  which  all  women 
dressed  in  skins.  Dissatisfied  with  this  in  turn, 
he  finally  decided  that  it  was  better  for  everybody 
concerned  that  women  should  live  in  trees. 
Women  were  never  really  happy,  he  said,  unless 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  41 

they  lived  in  trees,  and  on  that  point  his  argu 
ment  rested.  This  book  was  perhaps  more  ad 
mired  than  any  other  of  its  class,  for  it  was  quoted 
in  all  the  serious  journals  in  Europe  and  America 
and  translated  into  many  foreign  languages;  and 
it  may  be  for  aught  I  know,  part  of  the  bedside 
reading  at  this  moment  of  ten  thousand  hominists. 
Now  the  question  arose  at  once  whether  he 
really  cared  for  all  these  feminine  virtues  he  had 
praised  and  if  so  why  he  had  no  word  of  com 
mendation  for  the  sort  of  modern  women  who 
excelled  in  them.  A  collection  of  feminine  sim 
plicities  such  as  he  had  praised  was  published  soon 
afterwards  by  a  woman  writer.  Why  single  out 
Penelope  for  meekness,  for  example?  Arunta 
women,  said  she,  are  much  meeker,  for  if  an 
Arunta  woman  leaves  the  house  and  walks  about, 
her  brother  has  the  privilege  of  spearing  her. 
Was  Penelope  after  all  more  pious  or  self-effac 
ing  than  an  everyday  modern  Koniag?  she  in 
quired.  "In  Alaska  a  Koniag  woman  fasts  and 
lies  wrapped  in  a  bearskin  in  a  corner  of  her  hut 
when  her  husband  goes  whaling."  Woman 
"vaunteth  not  herself"  among  the  Zulus  for  a  Zulu 
woman  may  not  even  speak  her  husband's  name. 
Charm,  mystery,  veil  on  the  head,  walking  in 
quietness,  and  all  the  rest  are  as  she  pointed  out 
nowadays  plentiful,  sometimes  with  cannibalism, 
sometimes  without.  In  other  words,  the  answer 


42     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

of  this  feminist  to  this  hominist  was  simply  that 
if  he  really  desired  these  virtues  in  women  he  had 
only  to  look  about  the  world.  There  was  no  need 
whatever  to  regret  the  passing  of  the  Greek  and 
Hebrew  meek  ones.  There  were  Thlinket  women 
to-day  who  were  much  meeker.  There  were  at 
this  moment  sweet  natures  on  the  Upper  Congo 
and  among  the  Tshi,  Wagogo,  Kaya-Kaya,  Aleuts, 
Bantus,  Ostiaks,  and  Yarabaimba — sweet  femin 
ine  natures  absolutely  unspoiled. 

The  writer  of  the  book  in  question  did  not,  of 
course,  mean  anything.  He  did  not  want  all  idle 
women  killed.  He  did  not  want  all  women  to 
wear  skins.  He  did  not  really  care  for  tree- 
women  and  he  probably  never  knew  a  man  who 
did.  Simple  sweet  natures,  such  as  he  imagined 
in  the  time  of  Homer,  such  as  now  abound  along 
the  Congo,  wrould  on  the  whole  have  bored  him. 
And  if  the  women  of  his  family  or  acquaintance 
had  been  reduced  to  any  such  elementary  condition 
as  his  language  demanded,  he  would  have  been  the 
first  to  complain.  Not  only  did  this  hypocrite 
neither  seek  nor  relish  any  of  those  tender,  meek 
Wagogo  or  Kaya-Kaya  simplicities  in  his  con 
versation  with  actual  womankind.  At  bottom  he 
disliked  them. 

But  I  wonder  if  those  conscientious  women  who 
wrote  on  feminism  had  gone  about  their  business 
in  a  little  more  light-hearted  way,  whether  the  re- 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  43 

suits  would  not  have  been  more  permanent.  At 
tacking  an  institution  is  not  necessarily  a  gloomy 
occupation.  On  the  contrary  there  is  no  limit  to 
the  genuine  pleasure  felt  by  many  abounding  writ 
ers  of  our  day  on  finding  themselves  on  a  planet 
where  there  is  so  much  to  dislike.  Had  these 
writers,  bubbling  over  with  the  joy  of  demolition, 
been  born  on  a  star  whose  social  system  suited 
them,  imagine  how  cheated  they  would  have  felt. 
Here,  things  being  in  a  sad  mess,  they  are  happy, 
hitting  out.  But  the  women  writers  on  feminism 
seem  to  think  it  follows  from  the  painful  nature 
of  the  subject  that  the  style  of  writing  should  be 
painful  too. 

I  recall,  for  example,  another  of  them  who  in 
a  vigorous  volume  on  the  sex  relations  established 
the  fact  that  men  and  women  in  this  world  are  as  a 
rule  very  badly  mismated  and  then  made  some 
reasonable  guesses  as  to  the  cause  and  some  reason 
able  suggestions  as  to  improvement.  It  was  a  solid 
piece  of  work,  written  from  the  point  of  view  com 
monly  regarded  as  pernicious,  that  is  to  say,  with 
an  open  mind  toward  social  experiment.  It  was 
not  a  book  for  the  mentally  sheltered  classes.  One 
could  not,  for  example,  have  discussed  it  with  one's 
aunt,  and  one  would  hardly  have  wished  to  show 
it  to  a  United  States  Senator,  but  it  was  an  honest, 
independent  endeavor  to  systematize  ideas  that 
had  been  in  the  air  for  fifty  years  or  so.  The 


44     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

chief  objection  to  it  as  a  controversial  treatise  was 
that  it  was  steeped  in  gloom  and  clogged  by  the 
jargon  of  the  social  sciences.  Contemplation  of 
the  horrors  of  wedlock  and  the  horrors  of  celibacy, 
the  woes  of  all  who  are  wrongly  mated  or  too 
much  mated  or  not  mated  enough,  had  lowered  the 
writer's  vitality.  As  she  walked  the  streets  of  a 
bright  afternoon  she  was  weighed  down  by 
thoughts  like  these. 

There  is  hardly  one  person  in  a  hundred  of  those  who 
bear  the  name  of  human,  devoid  of  some  obscure,  in 
calculable  stigma,  from  which  every  anti-social  growth 
may  proliferate  like  a  cancer  and  endanger  the  very 
foundation  of  human  society. 

This  weakened  her  as  a  combatant.  She  went 
heavily  into  the  fray  encumbered  by  sociological 
and  biological  terms.  She  never  let  an  obvious 
thing  get  by  her  unsaid  and  she  hated  a  simple 
way  of  putting  it.  In  highly  complicated  language 
she  argued  that  although  marriage  was  an  inherit 
ance  from  ape-like  pre-human  ancestors,  it  did  not 
follow  that  married  people  nowadays  need  all  be 
have  like  apes.  Language  like  this  has  retarded 
the  woman  movement.  Language  like  this  would 
probably  have  retarded  any  movement.  The 
writers,  of  course,  were  not  primarily  to  blame  for 
it,  because  the  books  they  had  been  reading  were 
just  as  bad  or  worse. 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  45 

Peel  almost  any  page  of  sociology  and  you  will 
find  little  commonplaces  that  were  long  since  ban 
ished  from  intelligent  conversation.  As  a  woman, 
this  writer  if  she  met  you  face  to  face,  would 
never  think  of  telling  you  that  you  are  not  obliged 
to  behave  exactly  like  a  monkey  or  that  for  several 
reasons  you  may  be  justly  proud  of  European  civil 
ization,  or  that  an  institution  when  superfluous 
will  often  pass  away,  but  as  a  feminist  she  can  do 
so  without  turning  a  hair.  The  other  eminent 
apostle  of  the  cause  would  probably  think  twice 
at  the  dinner-table  before  remarking  that  woman 
ought  to  advance  in  morality  and  intelligence 
while  observing  the  outward  decencies.  Dinners 
are  often  very  dull,  but  I  doubt  if  even  at  the 
most  fashionable  you  could  successfully  make  this 
remark  to  the  woman  you  took  in.  But  as  a  fem 
inist  you  can  carry  it  off  with  a  high  hand. 

Social  philosophies  have  to  bluster  in  this 
large  language  in  order  to  conceal  the  smallness 
of  the  personal  basis  on  which  they  rest;  and 
when  in  the  sex-conflict  the  two  sides  pelt  each 
other  with  universals,  it  is  because  they  are 
ashamed  to  mention  the  rather  small  particulars. 
A  hominist,  for  example,  will  often  seem  to  wish 
to  save  the  world  from  an  invasion  of  unsexed 
Amazons  when  he  is  merely  fleeing  from  some 
single  female  relative.  The  feminists  reply  in  the 
same  manner,  damning  some  tiresome  man  by 


46     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION, 

everything  that  they  can  find  in   text-books  of 
sociology,  biology,  and  anthropology. 

If  hominist  and  feminist  ever  squabbled  in  real 
life  after  their  fashion  in  the  printed  page  one 
might  be  overhearing  some  day  on  the  train  some 
such  conversation  as  this : 

HE  :  My  dear,  you  are  quite  wrong  about  the  children's 
school.  You  do  all  your  thinking  in  henids.  There  is  a 
half-criminaloid  in  every  normal  woman  and  you  seem 
particularly  normal  to-day. 

SHE:  I  might  have  known  you  wouldn't  understand  it, 
George.  How  could  you?  Sprung  from  a  germ-cell 
that  has  fused  itself  with  the  larger,  self-contained  organ 
ism,  the  ovulum,  you'd  naturally  take  a  narrow  point  of 
view.  I  don't  like  to  say  it,  George,  but  you  have  always 
been  acratic.  And  I  have  never  known  the  time  when 
your  whole  personality  was  not  absolutely  determined  by 
teleological  sex  characteristics.  I  ought  not  to  have 
brought  up  the  subject  of  the  children's  education  again, 
but  I  did  hope  that  this  time  you  might  be  able  to  control 
that  little  tendency  toward  subjective  fetichism,  and — 

HE:  Their  school  is  plenty  good  enough  and  you'd  see 
it  yourself  if  your  psycho-physical  constitution  enabled 
you  to  overstep  the  limits  fixed  by  femininity,  but  the 
female  ever  hates  analysis.  Never  by  any  chance  in  your 
discussions  with  me  can  you  grasp  the  simple  notion  that 
the  significance  of  woman  is  Man.  The  female's  peculiar 
characteristic,  as  Havelock  Ellis  says,  has  always  been  her 
nervous  irritability,  and  you  drive  me  almost — 

SHE:  Havelock  Ellis.1     Why  drag  in  that  man?     Do 


FEMINIST  DEBATE  47 

you  consider  him  an  ilfastric  person?  The  children  aren't 
getting  on  in  their  studies  one  bit  and  they  aren't  making 
the  right  sort  of  friends  either,  whereas  Fanny  says  at 
the  Butler  School — but  why  expect  the  children's  welfare 
to  interest  you?  As  Woman  I  am  quite  accustomed  to 
your  point  of  view.  Among  the  Bobi  the  father  always 
ate  his  eldest-born.  The  children  of  the  Bangu-Zigzags, 
torn  from  their  mother  at  the  age  of  two,  are  made  to 
sleep  in  trees.  The  ancient  Foot  father  on  the  island  of 
Zab  slashed  the  cheek  of  each  of  his  daughters  with  a 
pointed  rock  dipped  in  the  juice  of  the  toto-berry.  Among 
the  Khai-muk,  Teh-ta,  Thlinket,  Mendi,  Jabim,  Loanga 
Bantu — but  what's  the  use?  You  come  by  it  all  so 
honestly. 


PLEASURES  OF  ANXIETY 

What  with  the  tango  and  the  slit  skirt,  eugenics 
and  the  pest  of  women's  thinking,  the  growing 
impudence  of  the  poor,  the  incorrect  conversion 
of  certain  negro  tribes,  and  the  sudden  appear 
ance  of  a  rather  strong  article  on  feminism,  civil 
ization  in  this  country,  and  perhaps  everywhere, 
was  drawing  to  its  close  in  many  a  serious  maga 
zine  article,  some  years  ago.  I  made  rather  a 
conscientious  survey  of  the  matter  at  that  time, 
and  I  recall  to  this  day  some  of  the  shocking  par 
ticulars.  Down  goes  the  dike,  said  one;  and  it 
seems  to  have  been  the  only  dike  that  could  have 
prevented  "our  civilization  from  being  engulfed 
in  an  overwhelming  flood  of  riches,  and  from  sink 
ing  in  an  orgy  of  brutality."  Now  that  religion 
has  gone,  said  another,  uthe  old-fashioned  prin 
ciples  of  right  and  wrong  have  also  largely  dis 
appeared."  Turning  a  few  pages,  I  found  the 
"ulcer  in  our  new  morality;"  a  few  more,  and  I 
saw  the  "canker  at  the  root  of  education."  Then 
I  learned  how  low  this  nation  was  rated  by  a 
connoisseur  of  all  the  nations  of  the  globe.  "Of 
all  the  countries  I  have  ever  met,"  said  he,  as  his 

48 


PLEASURES  OF  ANXIETY  49 

mind  reverted  along  the  parallels  of  latitude  to 
the  thirty-seven  populations  he  had  intimately 
known,  "this  country,  to  speak  candidly  is  the 
least  desirable;"  and  so  he  cast  off  the  country 
as  one  who  throws  away  a  bad  cigar. 

And  consider  society's  danger  from  astrologers. 
Abolish  astrologers  at  once,  said  another  con 
tributor,  and  also  spiritualists  and  quacks  and 
prophets;  for  if  we  do  not,  all  clean  culture  will 
soon  rot  and  vanish,  killed  by  the  germs  from 
this  "cultural  underworld."  There  were  dozens 
of  bodings  just  as  dark  as  these  in  other  numbers. 
But  there  was  always  a  consolation. 

When  perils  came  out  in  the  new  numbers,  it 
quieted  one  to  turn  to  the  old  perils  in  the  bound 
volumes  of  the  file — yellow  perils,  black,  white, 
brown,  and  red  ones,  horrors  of  house-flies  and 
suffragettes,  and  all  the  evil  kind  of  micrococcus, 
back  to  imperialism  and  the  bicycle  skirt  of  fifteen 
years  before,  and  to  read,  say,  of  Carrie  Nation 
ravaging  Kansas,  and  the  California  lady  who 
used  to  hurl  college  professors  through  the  win 
dows,  thus  destroying  academic  liberty,  and  Mc- 
Kinley  "blood-guilty"  and  sitting  on  a  "throne," 
and  Thanksgiving  day  changed  to  Shame  day  or 
the  Devil's  own  day  by  some  Boston  contributors, 
and  the  Stars  and  Stripes  painted  black  and  "re 
placed  by  the  skull  and  cross-bones,"  and  blood 
shed  in  fiction,  and  hazing  at  West  Point,  and  the 


50    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

United  States  government  "shaking  Porto  Rico 
over  hell."  And  every  time  saved  by  a  miracle — 
the  same  old  family  miracle ! 

I  could  not  deny  that  civilization  was  then  in 
danger,  but  it  did  seem  to  me  that  in  any  serious 
magazine  it  always  must  be  in  danger.  And  it 
so  happened  at  that  time  that  every  writer  was 
spared  all  anxiety  about  any  actual  danger.  The 
one  thing  not  noticed  on  any  of  the  quaking  pages 
I  have  mentioned  was  the  shadow  of  the  great 
war,  which  was  then  approaching. 

The  contributor  of  a  peril  to  a  magazine  is  not, 
as  a  rule,  an  unhappy  person.  On  the  contrary, 
he  is  often  a  large,  calm  man,  with  a  good  appe 
tite,  and  more  cheerful  in  his  mind  than  we.  If 
one  could  feel  toward  any  menace  to  humanity 
as  one  used  to  feel  toward  tales  of  Jack  the  Giant 
Killer,  just  believing  enough  for  a  little  goose- 
flesh,  there  would  be  more  fun  in  it.  Any  man 
who  is  about  half  convinced  that  he  and  a  few 
others  are  the  sole  remaining  friends  of  civiliza 
tion  finds  some  dramatic  zest  in  life.  It  is  a  mis 
take  to  assume  that  men  who  earn  their  living  by 
anxiety  are  at  all  anxious  in  their  private  lives. 

And  it  is  the  same  way  with  all  great  political 
despairs  in  private  conversation.  The  most  de 
pressing  talkers  you  ever  meet  are  not  themselves 
personally  at  all  depressed.  On  the  contrary,  they 
are,  at  bottom,  rather  gay  persons.  The  hopeless- 


PLEASURES  OF  ANXIETY  5 1 

ness  of  the  situation  really  adds,  for  the  purposes 
of  conversation,  to  its  charm,  by  absolving  from 
the  need  of  any  personal  effort  other  than  the  pre 
sumably  agreeable  one  of  talking.  In  middle  aged 
conversation  there  is  always  a  certain  cosiness  in 
political  despair,  and  the  thought  of  a  large  gen 
eral  disaster  coming  on  has,  at  any  rate,  one 
bright  side  in  the  way  it  warms  up  elderly  con- 
versers.  I  do  not  mean  to  deny  that  the  disaster 
may  exist  even  when  it  is  talked  about.  I  merely 
mean  that  if  a  disaster  did  not  exist  it  would  be 
necessary  to  invent  it. 

For  some  time  past  in  common  with  certain 
other  fellow-beings,  I  have  read  the  more  or  less 
radical  journals  with  greater  interest  than  the 
other  kind.  What  is  worse,  I  enjoy  various 
eccentric  and  perhaps  fanatical  or  one-idea'd  peri 
odicals  more  than  I  do  those  of  sober  cast  and 
steady  habits  and  institutional  point  of  view.  I 
confess  a  strong  distaste,  probably  a  vulgar  one, 
for  all  that  class  of  periodicals  which  no  gentle 
man's  library  used  to  be  without.  In  America  I 
have  found  more  pleasure  in  periodicals,  which 
would  be  reckoned  by  the  safe  person  as  unsafe, 
than  I  have  in  the  daily  journalism  of  broadly 
based  opinion  on  the  one  hand  or  the  monthly 
journalism  of  no  opinion  at  all  on  the  other  hand. 
I  mean  literally  pleasure,  for  in  this  preference 
I  have  not  primarily  my  country's  good  in  mind, 


52     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

or  the  future  of  civilization,  or  my  own  or  any 
body  else's  moral  safety.  I  suppose  I  share  these 
peculiar  and  ill-regulated  tastes  with  about  six 
million  persons  in  the  English-speaking  world. 
We  are  considered  a  small  band,  and  dangerous, 
for  some  reason,  though  the  thing  that  most  often 
strikes  me  is  how  numerous  we  are  and  how  mild. 

Nevertheless  it  is  a  minority  and  most  people 
that  I  know,  for  my  acquaintances  are  mainly 
among  the  majority,  do  not  find  pleasure  in  this 
type  of  journalism,  and  they  too  profess  to  regard 
it  as  dangerous.  In  this  for  the  most  part  I  be 
lieve  they  are  hypocrites — not  of  course  in  their 
expression  of  a  lack  of  pleasure  but  in  the  reasons 
they  give  for  it. 

I  deny  that  their  dislike  is  born  of  any  sense 
of  civic  danger.  It  is  the  product  of  ennui.  Peo 
ple  will  run,  and  always  have  run,  grave  risks  to 
existing  institutions  so  long  as  they  are  amused. 
When  they  are  not  amused  they  express  alarm  for 
the  safety  of  the  institutions.  It  is  simply  their 
emphatic  way  of  saying  that  they  are  not  amused. 
Thus  you  will  often  hear  a  man  say  of  a  certain 
periodical  that  it  ought  to  be  suppressed,  its  editor 
hanged,  all  its  contributors  tarred  and  feathered, 
and  the  premises  fumigated  by  the  health  board, 
and  then  add  casually  that  he  has  picked  it  up 
from  time  to  time  and  simply  could  not  read  a 
word  of  it.  Or  you  will  see  an  elderly  club  mem- 


PLEASURES  OF  ANXIETY  53 

her  so  incensed  by  some  article  on  birth  control 
(hard  enough,  Heaven  knows,  for  any  one  to 
keep  his  mind  on,  but  not  remarkable  in  any 
other  way)  as  to  be  hardly  capable  of  coherent 
speech,  and  find  him  five  minutes  later  with  all 
the  pornographic  French  weeklies  on  his  lap, 
soothed  again  and  beaming,  as  if  reassured  after 
all  in  regard  to  the  bloom  of  innocence  that  he 
had  almost  feared  was  passing  from  the  world. 
Not  that  I  pretend  to  know  which  is  the  better  for 
him — the  awful  Anglo-Saxon  solemnity  of  the 
article  on  birth  control  or  the  unconquerable  hil- 
ariousness  of  certain  French  minds  on  subjects 
more  or  less  akin  to  it.  But  neither  does  he  know 
and  he  simply  does  not  care.  For  the  rule  here 
applies  as  it  does  to  a  large  part  of  current  criti 
cism  that  distaste  sounds  more  emphatic  when  ex 
pressed  as  moral  disapproval.  With  most  of  us 
the  moral  counterblast  is  nothing  more  than  the 
angry  rendering  of  a  yawn. 

For  one  person  who  is  repelled  by  the  views 
of  the  sort  of  periodicals  I  have  mentioned  there 
are  a  hundred  persons  repelled  by  the  manner  of 
presenting  them,  and  their  objections  to  that  man 
ner,  so  far  as  I  have  heard  them  expressed,  seem 
to  boil  down  to  two  main  grievances :  In  the  first 
place  an  apparent  desire  on  the  part  of  the  writers 
to  conceal  their  thoughts,  and  in  the  second  place, 
and  what  is  more  important,  a  degree  and  con- 


54    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

tinuity  of  seriousness,  unattainable,  even  on  the 
assumption  that  its  attainment  is  desirable,  by  any 
person  in  the  outside  world. 

I  believe  there  is  a  basis  for  both  charges.  Con 
cealment  of  thought,  however, — vindictive  though 
it  often  seems — is,  as  a  rule,  involuntary.  Social 
studies  are  commonly  the  cause  of  this  defect, — or 
courses  taken  during  impressionable  years  at 
American  schools  of  political  science  where  any 
lucid  way  of  putting  things  is  always  hated,  if  it 
is  known  at  all. 

As  to  the  sort  of  seriousness  of  which  readers 
complain  I  confess  I  sometimes  cannot  see  the 
excuse  for  it.  The  radical  mind  seems  never  to 
permit  itself  an  instant's  respite  from  its  cares. 
At  least  I  have  never  happened  to  meet  one  of 
them  in  print  when  it  was  taking  it.  Pen  in  hand 
there  seems  only  one  of  two  things  for  it  to  do: 
Either  to  tell  people  how  they  ought  to  act  or 
blame  them  for  not  doing  so. 

It  is  invariably  harassed  by  the  cares  of  a  sort 
of  gigantic  paternity,  and  it  slumbers  not  nor 
sleeps.  If  it  did  its  watching  only  over  Israel  it 
might  lead,  comparatively  speaking,  rather  a  jolly 
life;  but  take  its  duty  to  Asia  for  example.  Asia 
is,  to  you  or  me,  for  comfortable  intervals  at 
least,  only  a  distant  continent  on  the  map.  Asia 
is  never  for  a  moment  anything  of  the  sort  to  a 
man  of  these  responsibilities.  Asia  to  him  is  as 


PLEASURES  OF  ANXIETY  55 

a  little  child  constantly  running  some  hairbreadth 
escape.  Russia,  says  he,  is  not  only  the  acid  test 
of  diplomacy;  it  is  the  acid  test  of  intelligence. 
Now  of  course  that  is  perfectly  true,  but  if  you 
follow  him  carefully  and  far  enough  you  will 
observe  that  Africa  also  is  an  acid  test  and 
so  is  South  America.  You  will  observe  also  that 
sex,  woman,  Bolshevism,  Shantung,  war  babies, 
North  Dakota,  feeble-mindedness  of  peace  com 
missioners,  Ireland's  wrongs,  syndicalism,  the  rail 
way  bill,  Poland,  classicism,  ultra-realism,  or  any 
thing  else  he  may  have  thought  about,  supplies 
the  acid  test  of  what  to  think;  anl  that,  as  the 
months  pass  by,  he  has  gradually  narrowed  the 
area  of  permissible  thinking,  that  is  to  say  the 
zone  of  opinion  conforming  to  his  own,  first  to  a 
strip,  then  to  a  long  line,  zigzag  and  perilous,  so 
narrow  that  two  can  scarcely  walk  abreast  on  it, 
and  then  if  they  should  chance  to  fall  to  quarreling 
one  would  inevitably  be  lost. 

Now  if  you  will  turn  back  six  months  on  the 
track  of  this  serious  person — a  thing  that  appar 
ently  the  serious  person  never  does —  you  will 
find  half  a  dozen  questions  reported  as  about  to 
flame,  which,  somehow,  never  flamed  at  all;  and 
you  will  find  a  score  of  problems  which  if  not 
solved  at  that  particular  instant  were  to  have 
brought  us  to  the  verge  of  the  abyss  but  which 
have  not  been  solved  since  then  and  seem  to  have 


56     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

been  forgotten  even  by  the  writer — along  with 
the  abyss.  In  short,  a  six  months'  retrospect  of 
him  seems  to  reveal  something  seriously  amiss 
with  his  seriousness.  It  would  seem,  after  all, 
that  some  of  the  responsibilities  were  needlessly 
incurred,  or  that  there  were  well  earned  intervals 
of  moral  repose  of  which  he  might  have  taken  ad 
vantage. 

A  special  and  temporary  reason  for  it  in  this 
country  may  have  been  a  too  close  relation  with 
the  universities.  There  has  often  been  an  inter 
locking  of  college  and  editorial  faculties  to  an  ex 
tent  most  discouraging  to  an  adult  general  reader 
who  prefers  not  to  continue  to  be  taught — or  at 
least  not  taught  as  in  a  university  from  which 
he  was  probably  glad  to  escape.  College  and 
editorial  chairs  have  often  got  so  mixed  up  that 
a  writer  forgot  which  he  was  sitting  in;  hence, 
floods  of  didacticism  were  poured  upon  the  pub 
lic  that  were  really  intended  for  Sociology  B.  And 
as  to  chairs  of  English  literature  they  were  notori 
ously  wheeled  chairs,  all  of  them,  and  likely  to 
turn  up  at  any  time  in  serious  journalism,  for 
when  a  man  once  firmly  settled  down  in  one  of 
them,  he  never  got  out,  and  even  after  resignation 
would  be  rolled  about  in  it  all  through  life,  rolled 
generally  into  some  editorial  office. 

But  any  one  at  all  familiar  with  the  pen-habits 
of  Americans  ought  to  know  that  the  sort  of  per- 


PLEASURES  OF  ANXIETY  57 

sons  he  thinks  he  is  meeting  in  these  serious  pages 
do  not  exist.  He  will  not  mistake  the  heavy  hand 
for  the  heavy  heart  and  he  will  not  imagine  that 
those  anxieties,  running  all  the  way  from  babies' 
milk  to  the  state  of  Europe  in  the  twenty-fifth  cen 
tury  are  really  felt.  He  will  realize  the  tradition 
of  serious  journalism  which  demands  as  a  matter 
of  course  that  a  man  s'hall  conceal  any  tremor  of 
indecision  in  regard  to  any  subject  that  comes 
along,  no  matter  how  tremendous.  And  he  will 
not  confound  a  human  attitude  with  a  simple  mat 
ter  of  conventional  technique. 


HATING  BACKWARDS 

So  far  as  I  can  recall  that  course  in  modern 
history  after  these  many  years,  human  liberty 
was  born  somewhere  in  the  Thuringian  forest. 
The  precise  spot  for  the  moment  escapes  me,  but 
the  professor  knew  it,  perhaps  had  visited  it.  He 
was  willing  to  admit  that  other  races  had  their 
missions,  not  without  some  value  to  the  world, 
but  on  this  one  thing  he  insisted :  Had  it  not  been 
for  that  blue-eyed,  fairhaired,  broad-chested  early 
Teuton  there  could  have  been  no  political  liberty 
as  we  enterprising  western  people  understand 
the  term.  The  Latin  idea:  All  authority  from 
above  down — by  the  grace  of  God.  The  Teutonic 
idea :  All  authority  from  below  up  by  the  will  of 
the  people.  There  you  have  it  in  a  nutshell — two 
irreconcilable  ideas  whose  conflicts  and  alterna 
tions  make  up  the  history  of  modern  Europe. 
Latin  elements  in  history :  The  Papacy,  Holy  Ro 
man  Empire,  divine  right  of  kings,  passive  resist 
ance,  Inquisition,  Counter-Reformation,  every 
form  of  obscurantism,  every  reactionary  move 
ment  down  to  the  present  day.  Teutonic  ele- 

58 


HATING  BACKWARDS  59 

ments:  Rise  of  the  Free  Cities,  Third  Estate, 
Witenagemot,  trial  by  jury,  British  Parliament, 
representative  government,  and  every  popular 
revolution,  or  progressive  tendency  down  to  the 
present  day.  In  short,  if  from  the  point  of  view 
of  modern  liberal  sentiment  anything  in  the  world 
went  wrong  there  was  a  Latin  devil  at  the  bottom 
of  it,  and  if  it  went  right  there  was  always  that 
early  Teuton  to  be  thanked.  Nor  let  us  forget 
his  deep-bosomed  spouse,  at  whose  chastity  so 
many  historians  have  exclaimed  with  a  degree  of 
astonishment  that  seems  unaccountable,  for  they 
themselves  could  not  have  been  wholly  without  ex 
perience  of  chaste  women  in  their  lives.  But  per 
haps  they  believed  that  chastity  also  occurred  for 
the  first  time  somewhere  in  the  Thuringian  forest. 
Every  reasonable  American  soon  grew  tired  of 
this  worthy  couple  and  I  fancy  the  Teutonic  ex 
planation  of  civilization  made  very  little  impres 
sion  on  the  minds  of  our  growing  youth.  But  this 
sort  of  nonsense  was  rather  prevalent  in  those 
days.  We  had  formed  the  habit  during  many 
years,  it  will  be  remembered,  of  shipping  to  Ger 
many  hordes  of  imitative,  unimaginative  Ameri 
can  scholars — a  wise  thing  to  do  if  we  compelled 
them  to  stay  there,  but  we  very  foolishly  let  them 
come  home  again.  Hence  in  my  unduly  pro 
longed  academic  experience  I  was  forever  en 
countering  unfortunate  creatures  who  had  fallen 


60     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

betwixt  the  two  stools  of  civilization,  and  did  not 
seriously  belong  anywhere.  A  good  many  of 
them  served  no  other  purpose  than  to  spread  a 
sort  of  German  measles  in  our  academic  life. 
However,  most  of  us  made  a  quick  recovery. 
There  have  never  been  many  people  in  this  coun 
try  who  really  cared  whether  the  superman  of  his 
tory  was  a  blond  or  a  brunette.  I,  for  example, 
am  a  party  man,  as  passionate  political  candidates 
are  fond  of  saying,  but  in  the  remotest  epochs  of 
universal  history  I  have  usually  rejected  my  pres 
ent  party  ties.  At  all  events  I  have  always  ap 
proached  the  affairs  of  early  German  forest  life 
rather  in  the  spirit  of  a  mugwump,  and  I  have 
never  cast  my  vote  for  any  divinity  that  ran  for 
the  office  of  historic  Providence  on  an  exclusively 
Teutonic  platform. 

On  the  other  hand,  during  the  late  war,  I 
escaped  the  opposite  danger  of  the  anti-Teutonic 
interpretation  of  history  of  the  theory  of  German 
diabolism.  I  owe  this  to  good  luck  and  not  to 
any  merit  of  my  own.  For  I  have  no  doubt  that 
it  was  only  the  shortness  of  the  war,  after  the 
entry  of  my  country  into  it,  that  saved  me  from 
that  same  faith  in  the  exclusively  German  origin 
of  evil  which  pervaded  the  writings  of  my  emi 
nent  contemporaries.  In  exhibiting  their  excesses 
here  I  have  no  desire  to  blame  them  but  only  to 
illustrate  the  grotesque  and  unnecessary  forms 


HATING  BACKWARDS  6 1 

that  patriotism  has  latterly  assumed,  particularly 
among  the  learned  and  literary  classes. 

All  through  the  war  the  ablest  English  and 
French  publicists,  journalists  and  men  of  letters 
were  busily  engaged  in  reducing  history  to  melo 
drama  with  the  Teutonic  element  as  the  villain 
of  the  piece.  The  French  were  especially 
thorough  in  their  methods — so  thorough  indeed 
that  they  went  far  beyond  the  capacity  of  human 
detestation.  It  was  not  enough  to  hate  all  Ger 
mans  of  the  present  day,  it  seemed,  or  even  to 
hate  them  through  eternity,  as  M.  Paul  Bourget 
so  earnestly  advised,  but  they  must  be  hunted  out 
at  the  beginning  of  their  history  and  hated  all 
the  way  down.  So  back  these  writers  went  in 
their  turn  to  that  same  tiresome  early  German 
couple,  looking  for  a  prehistoric  scandal,  and  they 
found  that  their  forest  life  was  a  devilish  loose 
one  at  best,  and  that  they  lied  like  thieves  even 
before  they  were  out  of  the  forest. 

As  an  instance  of  this  irrelevant  and  almost 
superhuman  indignation,  I  will  cite  the  labors  of 
a  widely  known  French  sociologist  who  set  out 
to  attack  the  Germans  sociologically  at  the  begin 
ning  of  the  war,  and  was  about  finishing  his  third 
volume  when  the  war  ended.  As  a  man,  he  felt 
toward  contemporary  Germans  just  as  you  or  I 
did  during  the  war.  As  a  man,  he  was,  in  com 
mon  with  you  and  me,  so  deeply  absorbed  in  the 


62     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

Germans  under  his  nose  that  he  did  not  much 
care  about  the  Germans  of  a  thousand  years  ago. 
That  is  to  say,  had  you  proved  to  him  that  excel 
lent  Germans  may  at  one  time  have  existed,  say  in 
the  underbrush  of  that  Thuringian  forest,  quite 
early  in  the  Christian  era,  it  would  not  have  al 
tered  his  opinion  in  the  slightest  as  to  the  Ger 
mans  that  he  saw  existing.  But,  being  by  some 
accident  of  birth  a  sociologist,  and  hence  a 
stranger  to  the  rude  pleasures  of  our  common 
speech,  he  could  not  say  what  he  liked  about  the 
Germans  as  he  knew  them.  He  had  to  be  as 
sociological  as  he  could. 

I  must  grasp  them,  he  said,  biologically,  ethno- 
logically,  psychologically,  historically,  and  at 
last,  synthetically;  I  must  seize  not  only  the 
social  soul,  but  the  individual  soul,  omitting  no 
element,  however  slight,  in  their  mental,  moral, 
or  material  life  at  any  moment  of  their  history. 
It  seemed  rather  a  dog's  life  for  him  to  lead,  but 
he  went  ahead  with  it. 

He  grasped  them  biologically  long  before  they 
were  out  of  the  forest,  and  he  fell  upon  them 
phylogenetically  the  moment  they  emerged.  He 
found  them,  as  savages,  more  savage  than  other 
savages.  He  gripped  them  enthnologically  about 
300  A.  D.,  showing  that  at  that  time,  as  now, 
they  surpassed  all  the  other  races  of  the  world  as 
liars.  He  next  seized  with  no  light  clasp,  every 


HATING  BACKWARDS  63 

exposed  portion  of  the  German  soul  he  could  lay 
his  hands  on  down  to  the  close  of  the  middle 
ages,  during  which  time  they  were  chiefly  en 
gaged  in  resisting  the  approach  of  civilization. 
The  purer  the  German,  the  darker  the  deed, 
summed  up  well  enough  the  middle  ages.  When 
the  Germans  through  no  merit  of  their  own  had 
reached  the  modern  period,  he  grasped  their  soul 
again ;  and  he  grappled  with  it  anew  in  Frederick 
the  Great's  reign,  when  it  turned  out  to  be  about 
the  same  as  it  had  been  hitherto;  and  then  he 
made  sure  that  it  remained  the  same  for  the  last 
two  centuries.  In  short,  the  soul  of  the  German 
people,  as  seen  any  time  these  last  two  thousand 
years,  looked  to  him  for  all  the  world  like  the 
soul  of  the  kaiser,  as  described  in  the  contem 
porary  columns  of  the  Allied  periodicals.  So  it 
turned  out  just  as  he  had  suspected  from  the 
newspapers  before  he  began  to  write  the  book. 

Now  the  German  soul  to  this  honest  and  in 
flamed  sociologist  was  nothing  whatever  but  the 
spiritual  equivalent  of  a  German  trench,  at  that 
moment  on  the  soil  of  France. 

The  sweep  of  his  soul  over  the  soul  of  the 
German  people  was  tremendous,  ranging  quite 
easily  from  Velleius  Paterculus  to  Mr.  Houston 
Chamberlain  and  back  again,  but  its  motive 
power  was  certainly  not  that  of  any  mere  scientific 
curiosity,  psychological,  historical  or  sociological. 
Its  flights  over  German  history  were  merely  those 


64     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

of  an  aeroplane,  looking  for  a  place  to  drop  a 
bomb.  To  sympathizers  with  his  cause  this  pur 
pose  seemed  altogether  laudable.  If  all  the 
sociologists  of  war-time  had  been  hollow,  and 
made  of  the  best  steel,  and  if  through  a  well- 
directed  group  of  them  shells  could  have  been 
shot  at  the  rate  of  1,600  every  minute  and 
a  quarter  at  a  given  point  in  the  enemy's  lines, 
there  were  a  great  many  of  their  readers  at  that 
time  who  would  have  gladly  seen  them  brought 
into  action.  But  when  they  shot  only  their  own 
sociology  it  was  a  different  matter,  for  it  was  not 
nearly  so  dangerous  to  the  foe  as  we  should  have 
liked  to  have  it,  and  besides,  from  the  moment 
of  discharge,  it  ceased  to  be  sociology.  Thus 
there  resulted  a  great  waste  and  a  misunder 
standing  all  round  and  not  a  German  was  brought 
down  by  their  compound  adjectives.  "As  soon  as 
war  was  declared  there  were  let  loose  those  mys 
tic  influences  which  prepared  it  and  which  were 
synthesized  by  the  ideal  of  universal  domination." 
This  was  not  a  sociological  explanation  of  a  peo 
ple's  mental  attitude.  It  was  simply  a  sociologist's 
manner  of  swearing.  A  plain  man  in  a  fight 
knows  at  least  that  he  is  fighting,  whereas  your 
sociologist  as  he  blazes  away  regards  himself  as 
quietly  engaged  in  scientific  research. 

And  why  this  pious  fraud  of  scientific  termin 
ology?     As  a  matter  of  fact  this  sociologist  in 


HATING  BACKWARDS  65 

his  laboratory  was  less  scientific  in  his  analysis 
of  the  German  soul  than  a  French  soldier  at 
Verdun  in  war  time.  He  was  afraid  to  note  any 
exception  to  this  rule,  and  the  poilu  at  the  front 
was  not.  To  the  broader  mind  of  the  po'ihi, 
with  his  calmer  sociological  outlook,  there  were 
several  kinds  of  Germans.  To  this  scientist 
there  was  only  one.  The  poilu,  with  scientific 
poise  and  a  mind  open  to  inconsistent  facts, 
knew  that  he  could  shoot  just  as  straight  even 
if  acknowledging  that  there  were  some  decent 
Germans  in  the  opposite  ranks.  This  socio 
logist  believed  he  could  not  write  straight  if  he 
mentioned  a  single  decent  German. 

The  difficulty  with  the  crowd  psychologist 
seems  to  be  that  he  does  not  allow  sufficiently 
for  the  effect  of  his  own  crowd  on  his  own  psy 
chology.  In  this  case  the  crowd  psychologist  had 
written  hundreds  of  learned  pages  all  to  the  effect 
that  it  is  impossible  for  any  one  to  escape  the 
contagion  of  the  crowd.  "Not  only,"  said  he, 
"do  men  of  different  races  not  understand  each 
other  but  they  have  the  greatest  difficulty  in 
imagining  the  possibility  of  holding  a  different 
view  from  their  own."  "The  evolution  of  the 
sentiments  is  independent  of  our  will.  No  one 
can  love  or  hate  at  pleasure?"  "Mental  con 
tagion  affects  also  the  isolated  individual."  "Race 
hatred  is  as  widespread  among  the  savants  as 


66     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

among  the  people."  "Men  of  different  races 
do  not  understand  each  other,  above  all  because 
the  generality  of  their  opinions  are  all  derived 
from  the  suggestions  of  environment  acting  upon 
the  unconscious  hereditary  elements  of  which  the 
characters  of  the  race  are  formed."  He  did  not, 
like  an  ordinary  person  refer  casually  to  these 
laws.  He  elaborated  them  into  volumes,  like  a 
sociologist.  But  not  a  word  did  he  say  about 
his  own  miraculous  immunity  from  their  opera 
tion. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  he  marched  on  through 
this  book  as  in  a  regiment — psycholigical  proposi 
tions  streaming  like  banners,  sociological  laws 
beaten  like  drums,  analyzing  the  German  soul  as 
others  would  sing  a  battle  hymn  and  trying  to 
grasp  the  history  of  the  Teutonic  peoples  exactly 
where  in  war  time  it  should  be  grasped,  that  is, 
by  the  throat.  His  psychology  emerged  just 
where  his  patriotism  began,  forming  a  healthy 
circle.  In  short,  he  gave  his  crowd  psychology 
completely  over  to  the  service  of  his  country. 
It  was,  in  his  own  opinion,  the  best  thing  he  had, 
and  one  had,  therefore,  to  applaud  him,  for 
giving  it,  even  while  admitting  that  others  had 
given  much  more.  But  a  man  of  his  mettle  could 
certainly  have  dispatched  the  German  soul  much 
better  without  sociology  than  with  it.  It  was 
foolish  to  enter  the  German  soul  with  that  quiet 


HATING  BACKWARDS  67 

air  of  sociological  precision  instead  of  with  a  war- 
whoop  when  it  came  to  the  same  thing  in  the  end. 
War-whoops  are  more  effective  and  less  mis 
leading. 

It  was  not  from  kindness  toward  any  Germans, 
however  early,  that  many  of  us  at  that  time  ob 
jected  to  hating  them  so  far  back  in  their  history. 
It  was  simply  because  it  seemed  to  us  a  tactical 
mistake  to  consume  in  the  pursuit  of  early  Ger 
mans  a  warlike  energy  which  might  be  put  to 
some  use  against  the  very  latest  ones.  Yet  a 
large  number  of  the  ablest  writers  during  the  war 
would  when  confronted  with  a  German  criminal 
of  any  kind  fall  into  an  absent-minded  fury  upon 
his  remotest  ancestor.  They  seemed  not  to  under 
stand  that  nothing  they  could  possibly  say  against 
Alaric  the  Visigoth  would  change  in  the  least  our 
sentiments  toward  any  modern  German  of  our 
acquaintance.  I  never  understood  at  the  time 
and  I  do  not  understand  now,  why  they  could 
not  skip  those  early  Germans.  No  sooner  did 
the  bombs  begin  to  fall  again  upon  the  Rheims 
Cathedral  than  some  one  wrote  a  letter  to  a  news 
paper  about  the  morals  of  the  Marcomanni,  and 
if  there  was  a  pro-German  in  the  neighborhood 
he  retorted  that  according  to  Tacitus  the  family 
life  of  the  early  Germans  was  very  pure.  This 
brought  out  a  third  man  with  a  quotation  from 
another  classic  author  to  the  effect  that  so  early 


68     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

as  the  first  century  A.  D.  every  German  was  al 
ready  a  scoundrel.  And  they  put  this  sort  of 
thing  into  all  their  war  books.  I  gathered  from 
many  of  these  writers  that  the  longer  you  looked 
at  an  early  German  the  less  you  would  like  him, 
but  I  could  not  guess  from  any  one  of  them  why 
it  was  necessary  to  look  at  him  at  all.  If  it  was 
for  the  nourishment  of  warlike  sentiment — and 
that  seemed  to  be  the  purpose  of  these  authors — 
it  was  surely  much  better  to  look  at  any  German 
political  leader,  or  at  any  pan-Germanist  pamphlet 
or  at  almost  any  German  Lutheran  divine. 

When  one  had  for  his  contemplation  an  event 
so  rich  in  hostile  significance  as  the  sinking  of  the 
Lusitania,  for  instance,  it  seemed  a  pity  to  turn 
back  and  curse  the  Cimbrians.  Suppose  Tacitus 
was  quite  wrong  in  saying  that  the  early  Germans 
were  often  chaste  and  sometimes  sober,  if  that  is 
what  he  did  say;  suppose  after  immense  historical 
exertions  I  could  have  proven  that  they  were 
never  sober  and  seldom  chaste;  why  should  I 
have  bothered  people  by  mentioning  it?  I  did 
not  deny  that  the  doings  of  that  German  forest 
married  couple,  say  about  the  year  50  A.  D., might 
well  have  been  perfectly  scandalous,  but  I  did 
'deny  that  the  point  was  of  the  slightest  belligerent 
value  to  us  in  our  existing  frame  of  mind.  Should 
we  have  happened  on  some  Hohen.zollern,  for 
example,  engaged  in  poisoning  a  well,  it  would 


HATING  BACKWARDS  69 

have  been  no  relief  to  our  feelings  to  hear  some 
one  with  a  far-off  look  in  his  eyes  exclaim,  "Why, 
how  like  Ariovistus!" — even  if  it  should  be  estab 
lished  that  Ariovistus  had  poisoned  a  well.  We 
could  not  at  that  crisis  hate  a  Quadus  of  the  first 
century;  we  could  not  even  hate  an  Alemannus  of 
the  second,  not  because  we  doubted  that  they  were 
detestable,  but  because  we  had  not  the  time.  Ger 
mans  of  our  own  day  were  too  engrossing. 

One  can  easily  understand  that  an  academic 
person,  like  any  one  else,  should  at  the  very  sound 
of  the  word  German  at  that  time,  have  been  car 
ried  away  by  his  feelings,  but  it  does  not  follow 
that  he  should  have  been  carried  so  far  away  as 
into  the  fourth  century.  A  hot  tempered  man 
away  off  in  the  fourth  century  smashing  miscel 
laneous  German  objects  gave  many  of  us  during 
the  war  rather  an  impression  of  carelessness,  when 
there  were  so  many  things  that  needed  attention 
nearer  home. 

If  it  had  really  seemed  that  this  manner  of 
writing  would  bring  down  the  German  empire 
any  sooner,  there  were  several  millions  of  French 
sympathizers  in  this  country  even  in  the  time  of 
our  neutrality  who  would  gladly  have  seen  it 
going  on,  and  some  of  us  would  no  doubt  have 
taken  a  hand  in  it.  I  for  one,  would  gladly  have 
had  a  fling  at  Alboin  the  Langobardus  if  I  had 
believed  it  would  aid  in  taking  a  single  German 


70     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

trench.  If  it  would  have  helped  General  Joffre 
to  have  us  hate  the  Germans  backwards,  we 
would  have  burned  the  Germania  of  Tacitus,  ex 
purgated  Caesar's  Gallic  War,  and  tried  to  get 
Velleius  Paterculus  into  the  schools.  If  it  had 
seemed  necessary  to  hate  them  forwards,  we 
would  have  founded  a  society  of  detestation  on 
the  model  of  "Souvenez-vous,"  a  French  associa 
tion  already  organized,  and  by  means  of  "books, 
pamphlets,  albums,  placards,  lectures,  films,  pic 
tures,  class-room  manuals,  New  Year's  gifts, 
prizes,  plays,  commemorations,  anniversaries,  and 
pilgrimages,"  every  one  of  them  perfectly  odious, 
we,  too,  might  have  committed  ourselves  through 
all  eternity  to  keeping  resentment  aglow.  But  it 
was  only  fair  that  we  should  know  in  advance 
why  it  should  be  done;  and  that  was  a  point  never 
cleared  up  by  any  of  these  eminent  writers,  dur 
ing  the  war  or  afterwards. 


AFTER  THE  WAR  IN  THOMPSONTOWN 

I  wish  to  say,  at  the  start,  that  I  see  no  sin  in 
the  sudden  wealth  of  Thompsontown.  I  am  not 
going  to  denounce  the  profiteers  of  that  city  or 
draw  any  moral  lesson  from  it  whatever.  I  do 
not  believe  that  the  wealth  of  its  inhabitants,  was 
in  its  origin,  either  moral  or  immoral,  or  that  it 
had  anything  to  do  with  the  relentless  working 
of  any  economic  law.  The  people  of  Thompson- 
town  became  rich  by  accident.  They  did  not,  in 
the  ordinary  sense,  make  money;  they  were  ex 
posed  to  it  and  caught  it,  like  a  cold.  To  attribute 
the  new  wealth  of  Thompsontown  to  any  form 
of  business  activity,  lawless  or  otherwise,  is  totally 
to  misconceive  the  situation.  Great  droves  of 
business  men  became  rich  through  their  inactivity; 
to  have  avoided  money  they  would  have  had  to 
dodge. 

Hat  men —  I  select  hat  men,  because  the  civili 
zation  of  Thompsontown  all  came  from  hats — 
hat  men  did  not  conspire  to  raise  the  price  of 
hats;  nor  was  there  any  great,  organizing  super- 
hat-man  who  amalgamated  hats,  driving  little 
hatters  to  suicide.  Hat  men  made  fortunes  out 

71 


72     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

of  hats,  simply  because  people  insisted  on  their 
doing  so.  I  mean  this  literally. 

I  mean  that  the  hat  man  would  have  had  de 
liberately  to  thwart  his  customers,  if  he  had  not 
put  up  the  price  of  hats.  Some  hat  men  did  at 
first  keep  down  the  price  of  hats,  and  their  cus 
tomers  scattered  all  over  town  looking  for  the 
same  hats  at  higher  prices.  As  wealth  increased 
in  Thompsontown,  hat  buyers  not  only  preferred 
a  worse  hat  at  a  higher  price,  but  would  walk  a 
mile  to  get  it. 

The  sort  of  people  who  became  rich  in  Thomp 
sontown  had  no  personal  preference  whatever  be 
tween  any  two  hats  when  considered  simply  as 
hats,  but  only  when  considered  as  symbols  of 
opulence.  A  five-dollar  hat  gave  a  five-dollar 
feeling  and  a  fifteen-dollar  hat  gave  a  fifteen-dol 
lar  feeling,  and  so  on,  and  that  is  all  there  was  to 
it.  Feeling  varied  with  the  price,  not  price  with 
the  feelings.  Feelings  varied  with  the  price,  the 
object  purchased  remaining  the  same.  Until  the 
people  of  Thompsontown  learn  the  prices  of 
things,  they  do  not  know  what  to  think  about 
them. 

Now  these  thousands  of  people  in  Thompson- 
town  have  made  money  merely  because  they  did 
not  break  off  habits  which,  perhaps,  after  all,  they 
could  not  have  broken  off.  People  with  shops 
in  State  Street  became  rich  just  because  they  did 


AFTER  THE  WAR  73 

not  close  their  shops  in  State  Street.  Fortune 
favored  every  dealer  just  because  he  did  not  cease 
to  deal.  They  did  not  seize  an  opportunity;  they 
merely  waited  to  be  seized  by  it;  and  while  there 
were  exceptions,  it  is  safe  to  say  in  general  that 
the  new  wealth  of  Thompsontown  was  the  reward 
for  going  where  you  usually  went  and  sitting 
there. 

Then  came  the  problem  of  spending  it.  They 
bought  automobiles,  of  course,  two  or  three  at  a 
time  apparently,  and  they  paid  sixty  dollars  for 
silk  shirts,  and  forty  dollars  for  shoes,  and  the 
women  wore  things  in  the  street  that  made  even 
them  uncomfortable,  and  State  street  became  in 
several  ways  the  equal  of  Fifth  Avenue.  You 
stood  an  equally  good  chance  of  being  killed  by 
an  equally  good  motor-car,  there  was  as  much  in 
convenience  in  getting  about,  and  the  noises  were 
almost  identical.  There  was  nothing  gay  or  high 
flying  about  it,  but  you  cannot  blame  them  for 
that.  Spectacular  spending  has  always  been  exag 
gerated  and  outside  print,  the  madder  prodigalities 
are  hard  to  find.  People  who  buy  ten  thousand 
dollar  tooth  picks,  do  it  by  stealth.  God  sees, 
and  Mr.  Upton  Sinclair — but  not  the  rest  of  us. 

But  nobody  seemed  to  be  doing  with  his  money 
anything  that  he  particularly  wanted  to  do.  No 
body  ever  showed  an  eccentricity.  Nobody  could 
be  said  in  any  sense  to  be  having  his  fling,  and 


74     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

while  the  newly  enriched  have  not  the  abandon 
anywhere  that  you  expect  of  them,  in  Thompson- 
town  they  are  particularly  tied  down.  Not  only 
has  there  never  been  anything  to  fling  to  in  Thomp- 
sontown,  but  there  have  never  been  the  sort  of 
people  who  could  fling.  Monte  Cristo  would  go 
in  a  limousine  to  the  Men's  Forum  of  the  Central 
Baptists  in  Thompsontown ;  Heliogabalus  would 
buy  a  thousand-dollar  overcoat;  and  each  would 
do  it  not  by  way  of  preliminary  indulgence,  but 
after  exhausting  every  other  joy.  Double  their 
fortunes  and  they  would  go  in  two  limousines  to 
the  Men's  Forum  of  the  Central  Baptists  and  buy 
two  thousand-dollar  overcoats. 

And  while  it  was  true  of  everything  bought 
by  the  great,  new,  nonplussed  hordes  of  the  sud 
denly  prosperous,  down  to  shoes,  shirts,  under 
wear,  things  applicable  to  the  most  unimaginative 
needs,  it  was  particularly  true  of  things  into  which 
the  personal  fancy  might  more  freely  enter,  such 
as  household  furniture,  ornament,  bric-a-brac. 
But  personal  fancy  never  did  enter.  Money  came 
before  desire  had  emerged,  and  the  joy  of  getting 
was  in  counting  the  cost  of  what  you  got.  To  the 
ten  thousand  newly  enriched  citizens  of  Thomp 
sontown  one  thing  was  literally  as  good  as  an 
other,  and  divergent  prices  had  to  be  invented 
as  the  only  means  of  telling  things  apart. 

This  had  always  been  something  of  a  difficulty 


AFTER  THE  WAR  75 

in  Thompsontown  and  the  city  itself  is  really  the 
result  of  this  embarrassment.  People  who  were 
not  utterly  distracted  as  to  what  to  do  with  their 
money  would  never  have  built  it  as  they  did.  The 
public  buildings  were  all  put  up  for  about  $500,- 
ooo  apiece,  and  for  no  other  imaginable  motive. 
The  richer  you  got  the  less  you  cared  what,  in  an 
architectural  way,  happened  to  you,  so  long  as 
it  was  a  good  deal.  If  a  multi-millionaire,  you 
let  them  build  you  anything,  provided  it  was  big 
enough,  and  they  usually  decided  on  an  orphan 
asylum  with  a  front  door  like  a  valentine. 

All  Main  Street  was  built  up  by  well-to-do 
people  who  had  not  the  slightest  personal  inclina 
tion  as  to  the  sort  of  places  they  wanted  to  live 
in.  Its  domestic  architecture  is  a  sincere  and  ade 
quate  expression  of  that  frame  of  mind.  There 
is  not  a  house  in  Main  Street  that  does  not  assert 
emphatically  the  owner's  sentiment:  What  does 
it  matter  where  I  am? — and  there  is  really  no 
reason  for  preferring  any  house  to  any  other, 
aside  from  the  price.  Cost  in  Thompsontown  has 
always  been  the  true  key  to  the  nature  of  things. 

Political  economy  has  not  a  word  of  sense  to 
say  to  such  phenomena  as  the  newly  rich  of 
Thompsontown.  What  becomes  of  the  law  of 
supply  and  demand  when  applied  to  the  front  par 
lors  of  Maple  Street?  If  you  charged  enough  for 
bunches  of  bananas,  you  would  see  a  bunch  of 


76     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

bananas  in  the  front  window  of  every  house  on 
Maple  Street.  You  will  find  anything  in  a  house 
on  Maple  Street,  if  it  costs  enough;  and  that  is 
the  only  reason  why  you  find  it  there.  You  cannot 
account  for  these  things  in  the  manner  of  econom 
ists;  it  is  absurd  to  suppose  that  anybody  wanted 
them. 

But,  in  saying  that  the  new  wealth  is  not  the 
result  of  enterprise,  I  do  not  mean  that  Thomp- 
sontown  is  an  unenterprising  or  from  a  practical 
point  of  view  a  backward  place.  On  the  contrary, 
it  is  famous  for  its  energy.  If  I  were  Walt  Whit 
man  I  could  sing  as  well  in  Thompsontown  as  on 
Brooklyn  Bridge.  I  could  sing  all  day  of  hats 
and  corset-covers,  of  shoes,  nails,  lead  pipe,  soap, 
and  gas  fixtures,  regarded  as  embodiments  of 
Thompsontown  will-power.  Nor  do  I  mean  any 
thing  invidious  in  respect  to  progress. 

In  public  spirit,  Thompsontown  has  caught  up 
to  Syracuse,  and  it  has  surpassed,  I  believe  Zeno- 
bia,  Esopus,  Rome,  Thebes,  Ephesus,  Priapus, 
every  city  in  that  part  of  the  State.  Community 
song,  community  bath-tubs,  community  churches; 
public  teas,  talk,  and  chicken-dinners;  welfare 
works;  public  outdoor  movements  if  you  want  to 
go  outdoors;  public  indoor  movements  if  you 
want  to  stay  inside;  helping  hands  held  out  so 
thick  that  it  is  impossible  to  slip  between  them — 
there  never  was  a  better  town  to  lose  a  leg  in  or 


AFTER  THE  WAR  77 

in  which  to  be  saved  from  a  life  of  shame. 
Thompsontown  is  filled  with  public  spirit  almost 
as  soon  as  the  spirit  is  made  public,  no  matter 
what  the  spirit  is.  A  headline  carried  for  eight 
days  by  the  better  sort  of  newspapers  becomes  an 
institution  there. 

No  sooner  had  the  new  patriotism  been  in 
vented — I  mean  the  kind  that  would  hang  Thomas 
Jefferson  to  a  sour  apple  tree — than  the  clergy  of 
Thompsontown  were  solid  to  a  man  for  the  de 
portation  of  anybody  that  it  occurred  to  anybody 
to  deport;  and  the  whole  town  became  so  safe  and 
sane  that  it  would  have  brained  an  anarchist  be 
fore  it  knew  he  was  one.  It  would  be  a  madman 
who  complained  that  Thompsontown  did  not,  in 
a  public  way,  keep  abreast  of  things. 

But  private  spirit  does  seem  somewhat  lacking 
in  Thompsontown.  Citizens  of  it  are  magnificent 
in  groups,  but,  detach  the  individual  from  his 
group  and  he  loses  color — like  a  fish  scale.  And 
the  lack  of  personal  differences  makes  it  hard  to 
imagine  a  personal  preference,  and  as  you  meet 
rich  people  singly  you  lose  respect  for  the  rights 
of  property  and  the  laws  of  the  land.  Robbing 
them  does  not  seem  like  robbery;  it  seems  like 
rescue;  it  is  impossible  to  think  they  desire  their 
possessions.  Pillage  seems  rather  attractive. 
You  could  not  hate  a  Hun  who  plundered  Main 
Street;  you  could  only  wonder  at  him.  If  a  bomb 


78     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

fell  anywhere,  it  would  do  a  lot  of  good.  That 
is  the  trouble  with  looking  at  the  new  wealth  of 
Thompsontown ;  it  makes  you  a  reckless  man.  It 
is  impossible  to  avoid  the  reflection  that  even  with 
a  soviet  in  the  City  Hall  and  the  whole  town  liv 
ing  in  phalansteries  and  the  dullest  Utopia  ever 
dreamt  of  come  to  pass,  there  could,,  after  all,  be 
no  diminution  of  those  personal  diversities  which 
present  day  society  is  said  to  keep  alive — varieties 
of  art  and  mental  interest,  individual  expression, 
fancy,  freedom  of  view,  idiosyncrasy — and  no 
danger  at  all  of  the  dead  level  dreaded  by  the 
orthodox.  For  the  personal  diversities  do  not 
exist  and  the  level  could  not  be  deader. 

And  freedom  of  mind,  always  so  hard  to 
attain  in  Thompsontown,  became  impossible  after 
the  war,  when  the  town  shook  with  the  fear  of 
Bolshevism.  Indeed,  it  was  dangerous  to  possess 
a  mind  after  the  lectures  on  Bolshevism  began  in 
the  People's  Athenaeum.  I  recall  one  which  ran 
about  as  follows: 

There  was  no  such  thing  as  Bolshevism  in  the 
sense  of  a  body  of  social  and  economic  theories 
and  ideas,  said  the  speaker.  The  Bolsheviki  had 
no  theories  and  no  ideas,  and  the  only  thing  that 
need  be  said  about  their  programme  was  that  it 
was  a  programme  of  crime.  They  were  simply 
all  murderers,  bandits,  and  degenerates  paid  by 
Germany  to  plunder  and  kill.  They  were  ex- 


AFTER  THE  WAR  79 

clusively  the  product  of  German  intrigue.  Many 
years  before  the  war  the  Germans  said  to  them 
selves,  "Let  us  create  the  Bolsheviki  who  will  so 
weaken  the  Russian  state  that  we  may  get  control 
of  it."  So  they  created  the  Bolsheviki. 

After  the  war,  when  the  Bolsheviki  were  ap 
parently  weakening  the  German  state  as  well  as 
the  Russian,  that  also  was  the  result  of  a  German 
plot.  The  Germans  were  pretending  to  be  Bol 
shevists  in  order  to  frighten  the  Allies  into  mak 
ing  softer  terms  of  peace.  Bolshevist  uprisings 
were  arranged  in  Germany  and  in  some  instances 
made  to  look  like  revolutions.  Here  and  there 
people  would  be  massacred  or  a  premier  assassin 
ated  or  an  alleged  Bolshevist  hacked  to  pieces, 
but  in  this  the  Germans  were  not  serious.  They 
were  only  trying  to  make  the  Allies  think  they 
were.  A  German  may  be  sanguinary,  said  he, 
but  he  is  never  serious.  When  they  were  killing 
each  other  in  the  streets  by  the  hundreds  they 
were  laughing  in  their  sleeves  at  the  impression 
of  seriousness  they  were  producing  upon  other 
people.  Germans  are  always  up  to  some  such 
tricks  when  they  kill  each  other  by  the  hundreds, 
said  he.  When  they  were  suppressing  Bolshevism 
in  Berlin,  they  had  no  objection  to  Bolshevism. 
They  were  not  even  thinking  about  Bolshevism. 
They  were  simply  thinking,  "What  a  splendid 
hoax  on  the  Allies!"  Nor  did  the  setting  up  and 


8o    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

pulling  down  of  Soviets  arise  from  any  interest  in 
Soviets.  They  did  not  care  either  one  way  or  the 
other  about  Soviets.  The  setting  up  and  pulling 
down  of  Soviets  was  a  mere  ruse  to  produce  the 
impression  that  Soviets  were  being  set  up  and 
pulled  down.  Fortunately,  the  Allies  were  not 
duped  by  this  affection  and  accordingly  the  pro 
gramme  failed. 

And  now,  according  to  the  speaker,  began  the 
huge  final  German  conspiracy  which,  if  not  balked, 
would  sweep  from  the  world  every  vestige  of  civil 
ization.  Germany's  plan  was  to  ruin  the  world 
in  order  to  rule  it.  To  do  this  s-he  was  about  to 
engage  along  with  Russia  in  a  campaign  of  Bol- 
shevization  in  all  the  nations  on  the  earth.  This 
would  not  adhere  to  a  fixed  programme  but  would, 
in  every  country,  take  the  course  that  soonest  led 
to  chaos,  whatever  that  course  might  be,  and  when 
chaos  was  accomplished  Germany  would  at  once 
help  herself  to  anything  she  wanted  in  it.  There 
was  but  one  remedy.  Bolshevism  everywhere  must 
be  stamped  out  instantly  by  force. 

I  repeat  these  too  familiar  remarks  because  al 
though  they  had  long  been  matter  of  journalistic 
routine  in  the  respectable  press  of  three  countries 
their  effect  on  Thompsontown  was  very  inflam 
matory,  and  a  tragic  consequence  was  narrowly 
escaped.  Eager  to  destroy  Bolshevists  when  there 
were  no  Bolshevists  in  Thompsontown  to  destroy, 


AFTER  THE  WAR  81 

the  patriotic  element  in  the  town  turned  in  its 
wrath  upon  old  Professor  Henderson. 

Now  it  would  be  impossible  to  imagine  a  man 
more  remote  from  all  the  issues  that  agitated 
Thompsontown  than  old  Professor  Henderson. 
Some  ante-natal  circumstance  had  destined  him  to 
Thompsontown  and  he  went  on  living  there  out 
of  sheer  absence  of  mind,  obviously  irrelevant  to 
everything  in  it.  As  a  political  philosopher,  he  had 
been  known  for  thirty  years  outside  Thompson- 
town  for  his  singular  faculty  of  animating  sub 
jects  commonly  put  to  sleep  in  American  univer 
sities.  He  was  also  one  of  the  few  humane 
writers  on  history  during  his  generation,  and 
he  had  actually  brought  a  touch  of  life  to  the 
minds  of  other  writers  of  history,  which  of  itself 
to  any  one  acquainted  with  American  historians 
seemed  superhuman.  For  the  rest  he  was  a  specu 
lative  and  inquiring  sort  of  person  who  ap 
proached  subjects  somewhat  in  the  manner  of 
Socrates,  trusting  that  in  these  modern  days  he 
would  escape  the  cup  of  hemlock;  and  in  this 
spirit  he  discussed  the  fundamentals  of  political 
philosophy,  turning  patriotism  inside  out,  turning 
the  virtues  upside  down,  that  is  to  say,  doing 
everything  that  people  have  done  in  the  discussion 
of  political  philosophy,  ever  since  the  Greeks  be 
gan.  In  short,  everybody  knew  him  from  his 
writings  for  the  sort  of  man  who  gave  other 


82     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

people's  intellects  something  to  do  and  thus  kept 
other  people  out  of  mischief.  There  might  have 
been  some  things  in  Professor  Henderson's  writ 
ings  that  would  have  shocked  a  policeman,  but  if 
the  policeman  had  read  them  all  through  he  would 
almost  certainly  have  decided  not  to  arrest  him. 

But  he  seemed  of  a  sudden  dangerous  to  all  the 
authorities  of  Thompsontown.  The  Eagle-Record 
set  out  in  pursuit  of  him  in  six  leading  articles; 
and  four  speeches  were  made  against  him  at  the 
Veterans'  Lodge.  There  was  a  hunt  for  suspic 
ious  circumstances,  and  the  suspicious  circum 
stances  were  found.  They  consisted  of  detached 
passages  from  his  books,  which  sounded  rather 
sanguinary.  It  was  understood  that  the  prosecut 
ing  officer  was  about  to  move  and  people  said  it 
would  serve  the  old  pro-German  right.  Four 
young  men  who  had  spent  their  war-time  in  New 
Jersey  talked  of  lynching;  and  the  Rev.  Madison 
Brace,  brother-in-law  of  the  millionaire  proprietor 
of  Neuralgia  Syrup,  referred  in  his  sermon  at  the 
Tabernacle  to  the  "poison  of  Bolshevism  instilled 
into  the  minds  of  youth  under  the  guise  of  political 
philosophy."  Then  to  the  surprise  of  everybody 
the  matter  was  dropped  and  it  leaked  out  after 
wards  that  all  the  seditious  passages  in  his  books 
were  found  in  the  Bible  or  in  the  Areopagitica  of 
Milton. 

Now,  as  I  write  this,  immediately  after  the  nar- 


AFTER  THE  WAR  83 

row  escape  of  Professor  Henderson,  I  do  not  find 
the  situation  altogether  depressing.  On  the  con 
trary  I  see  a  chance  for  the  return  of  a  certain 
measure  of  mental  liberty  to  Thompsontown.  I 
believe  that  instances  of  this  nature  may  carry 
their  own  cure  even  in  Thompsontown  and  that 
more  steps  in  this  direction  will  result  in  some 
thing  so  extreme  that  it  will  set  free  enough  plain 
sense  to  sweep  it  all  away.  For  assume  that  this 
incident  had  been  a  trifle  more  extreme.  Suppose, 
for  example,  that  some  uncommonly  vigilant  con 
stable  of  conversation  employed  by  our  League  of 
Patriotic  Speech  had  caught  Professor  Hender 
son  at  something  heinous — poisoning  a  State 
Street  man's  mind,  say,  by  talking  about  a  higher 
patriotism — or  caught  him  with  the  Divine  Mon 
archy  in  his  hand  speculating.  Suppose  then  after 
being  thrown  into  jail  Professor  Henderson  is 
brought  before  a  judge  who  is  a  constant  reader 
of  all  the  League's  publications  and  a  person  ex 
tremely  cautious  in  his  thoughts  and  the  judge 
decides,  without  a  crease  in  the  marble  solemnity 
of  his  countenance,  to  sentence  Professor  Hender 
son  to  five  years  in  chains. 

It  would  not  necessarily  be  a  dark  moment  for 
Thompsontown  when  the  chains  were  fastened  on 
Professor  Henderson.  On  the  contrary,  it  might 
be  the  dawning  of  its  day.  There  might  begin  a 
new  spirit  of  understanding  and  geniality  from 


84    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

the  very  moment  when  Professor  Henderson  was 
thrown  into  chains.  He  is  so  obviously  the  sort 
of  person  who  ought  not  to  be  in  chains  that  out 
side  Thompsontown  the  sense  of  incongruity 
would  be  instantly  and  widely  awakened;  and 
some  of  the  sense  might  find  its  way  back  into 
Thompsontown.  Wit  might  sift  in  through  little 
cracks  in  the  walls  of  editorial  rooms  hitherto 
supposed  to  be  altogether  thought-proof.  Com 
mon  sense  might  descend  upon  the  people  in  waves 
upon  waves.  And  with  the  striking  of  the  chains 
from  Professor  Henderson  might  come  the  clear 
ing  away  of  the  whole  nightmare  of  indiscriminate 
and  unintelligent  repression  and  some  glimmer  of 
a  notion  as  to  who  are  enemies  and  who  are  not 
in  the  world  around.  Having  once  reached  the 
outer  limit  of  burlesque,  Thompsontown  might 
perhaps  revert  in  the  direction  of  reality. 


INTERNATIONAL  CANCELLATION 

From  hasty  and  disconnected  reading  of  the 
treaty  discussion  I  may  have  became  confused 
in  mind,  and  I  am  not  sure  that  I  recall  exactly 
the  names,  dates,  and  other  details  of  a  certain 
article  by  an  expert  in  foreign  affairs  that  I  re 
cently  encountered,  but  I  can  at  least  reproduce 
the  spirit  of  it.  It  was  on  the  subject  of  Lower 
Magnesia,  with  which  the  writer  says  every  reader 
ought  to  be  as  familiar  as  he  is  with  the  Banat  of 
Temesvar. 

Now  the  Lower  Magnesians  are,  he  says,  of 
the  purest  Jingo-Sloven  breed,  and  for  nine  hun 
dred  years  they  have  burned  for  reunion  with 
their  kinsmen  of  Mongrelia,  from  whom,  as  every 
body  knows,  they  were  ruthlessly  torn  by  Fred 
erick  Barbarossa.  From  that  day  to  this  they 
have  hated  the  North  Germans  to  a  man,  and  the 
duty  before  the  Peace  Conference  was  perfectly 
clear.  It  should  either  have  erected  Lower  Mag 
nesia  into  an  autonomous  principality  within  the 
limits  of  the  ancient  Duchy  or  Citrate  (that  is  to 
say,  between  the  Bugrug  mountains  and  the  river 
Mag) ,  or  it  should  have  united  it  with  Mongrelia. 

85 


86     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

Instead  of  that  it  was  provided,  by  articles  131- 
422  of  the  treaty,  that  the  question  should  be 
left  to  a  plebiscite.  This  gave  the  Germans  their 
chance  and  they  did  exactly  what  the  writer,  know 
ing  the  German  character,  expected  them  to  do. 
They  secretly  raised  an  army  of  700,000  men 
and  threw  it  into  coal  holes  from  which  it  was  to 
emerge  at  the  moment  of  the  plebiscite,  disguised 
as  Magnesian  school-teachers.  This  was  done  so 
secretly  that  even  now  no  one  among  the  Allies 
has  the  slightest  suspicion  of  it.  The  writer  him 
self  knows  how  secret  it  was  because  he  has  it 
on  the  authority  of  a  secret  document,  which  docu 
ment  is  so  S'ecret  that  its  existence  is  unknown  even 
to  the  man  who  possesses  it. 

I  should  like  to  see  set  up  along  with  any  frag 
ment  of  the  League  of  Nations  that  may  still  re 
main  when  these  words  appear  in  print,  a  sort 
of  clearing-house  for  international  impressions. 
Clearing-house  may  not  be  quite  the  word  for  it, 
but  it  suggests  what  I  believe  to  be  the  necessary 
limitations  of  the  plan,  which  would  not  concern 
itself  with  the  correction  of  impressions  but  only 
with  the  setting  off  of  one  impression  against  an 
other.  As  the  press  of  each  country  is  at  every 
moment,  contradicting  itself,  cancellation  on  a 
large  scale  would  inevitably  result. 

That  all  writers  on  foreign  affairs  are  simply 
guessing  is,  I  believe,  a  safe  rule  to  lay  down.  In- 


INTERNATIONAL  CANCELLATION     87 

deed  they  themselves  seldom  pretend  to  be  doing 
anything  else,  and  I  have  no  doubt  that  the  better 
sort  among  them  are  often  shocked  by  the  serious 
way  in  which  they  are  taken  by  those  whom  they 
seek  to  entertain.  Of  course  I  do  not  deny  that 
the  dark  forces,  dangerous  undercurrents,  and 
sinister  designs  evoked  by  the  writers  on  foreign 
affairs  do  sometimes  actually  exist.  I  simply  mean 
that  their  existence  ought  never  to  be  inferred 
from  their  evocation.  Their  evocation  is  constant, 
their  existence  only  occasional. 

Take,  for  example,  the  vast  Anglo-Saxon  con 
spiracy  as  conceived  by  a  dozen  French  journal 
ists  at  this  moment  (thought  it  may  be  forgotten 
the  next  moment)  and  the  equally  vast  French 
conspiracy  as  conceived  by  a  dozen  English  and 
American  ones.  Dozen  for  dozen  these  writers 
seem  to  me,  from  their  manner  of  writing,  almost 
equally  astute.  They  all  have  the  same  air  of 
certitude  and  the  same  reticence  as  to  the  reasons 
for  it.  Dozen  for  dozen  they  are  evenly  matched 
so  far  as  I  can  see,  as  regards  access  to  those  sure 
but  unmentionable  sources  of  truth,  which  are 
known  only  to  the  writer  on  foreign  affairs,  and 
as  regards  intimacy  with  those  highly  placed  and 
serious  persons,  not  to  be  named  without  violating 
a  confidence,  who  though  stonily  impenetrable  to 
all  the  rest  of  the  world,  pour  out  all  the  secrets 
of  their  bosoms  as  soon  as  they  learn  that  the 


88     THE  *  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

person  they  are  talking  to  writes  for  a  newspaper. 

In  short,  I  see  no  reason  why  these  two  groups 
of  expert  writers  on  foreign  affairs  are  not  equally 
entitled  to  my  confidence. 

Nor  do  I  deny  that  both  conspiracies  may  as  a 
matter  of  fact  exist.  I  admit  that  the  American 
and  British  governments,  working  in  the  dark, 
may  have  cemented  that  Anglo-Saxon  blood-pact 
for  the  extirpation  of  all  the  Latin  races  in  the 
world.  And  I  admit  that,  unseen  by  any  human 
eye,  the  French  premier  and  his  commander-in- 
chief  may  have  perfected  that  gigantic  plan  for 
the  Gallo-Latin  domination  of  the  universe.  Das 
tardly  designs,  both  of  them,  I  say,  and  I  certainly 
have  no  desire  to  throw  anybody  off  his  guard  in 
respect  to  them.  But  there  is  one  thing  I  will 
not  admit  about  this  whole  black  devilish  business 
that  may  be  brewing  around  us  under  cover  of  the 
night,  and  that  is  that  any  writer  in  either  group, 
whose  article  I  have  happened  to  read,  really 
knows  any  more  about  the  thing  than  I  do.  They 
not  only  do  not  mention  any  reason  for  supposing 
that  the  respective  plots  exist  or  any  person  who 
believes  in  the  plot's  existence  but  they  do  not 
even  tell  you  how — whether  by  dreams,  ghosts, 
portents,  flights  of  birds,  thunder  on  the  left  side, 
songs  of  sacred  chickens,  or  hierophancy — they 
themselves  got  a  glimmer  that  the  plot  does  exist. 

In  other  words,  they  seem  to  take  for  granted 


INTERNATIONAL  CANCELLATION     89 

the  plot's  existence  and  then  prove  in  great  detail 
the  horrors  of  it — which  is  precisely  the  opposite 
of  what  any  serious  person  in  possession  of  the 
dreadful  information  would  do.  He  would  work 
with  might  and  main  to  prove  to  other  people  the 
plot's  existence  and  he  would  then  take  for  granted 
their  appreciation  of  its  undesirable  results.  Even 
if  the  world  is  rent  in  twain  by  one  or  both  of 
these  conspiracies  upon  the  publication  of  these 
words,  I  shall  still  insist  that  none  of  these  writers 
had  the  slightest  notion  that  it  would  come  to  pass. 
The  nonchalance  of  writers  who  say  they  see 
a  world  in  flames,  would  be  incredible  if  they 
thought  they  saw  it.  No  man  in  private  life 
would  casually  say  to  the  surrounding  family  of 
an  evening  that  in  well-informed  circles  on  the 
second  floor  he  had  learned — or  that,  from  au 
thorities  on  the  first  floor,  credibly  reported  to  be 
in  the  confidence  of  the  janitor,  he  had  gathered 
— that  the  upper  stories  of  the  building  were  at 
the  moment  on  fire,  nor  would  he,  on  remarking 
the  serious  nature  of  the  affair,  return  to  the  read 
ing  of  his  newspaper.  These  writers  would  never 
shoot  a  dog  in  the  light  spirit  in  which  they  damn 
a  nation.  When  it  comes  to  the  shooting  of  a 
dog,  writers  are  always  able  to  produce  some  sort 
of  an  excuse.  I  may  add  that  when  the  world 
does  actually  burst  into  flames  the  writers  I  have 
mentioned  are  not  the  ones  who  notice  it 


90     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

Now  the  impartial  display  of  this  sort  of  thing 
by  the  central  body  to  which  I  have  referred  would 
show,  I  think,  that  the  suspicion  of  hostile  designs 
has  as  a  rule  no  basis  in  the  public  mind,  or  even 
in  the  writer's,  but  is  a  mere  matter  of  journalistic 
routine  in  every  country;  that  of  course  there  are 
exceptions  but  that  this  is  the  rule.  And  then  if 
it  culled  from  each  national  press  the  narrowest 
thoughts  of  its  narrowest  thinkers,  for  submission 
without  remark  to  the  quiet  scrutiny  of  many 
lands,  who  knows  that  the  countries  might  not  be 
drawn  together  out  of  sheer  distaste  for  the  sort 
of  people  who  held  them  apart?  The  combing  out 
from  each  press  of  all  its  chauvinists,  of  all  its 
imperialists,  colonial  expansionists,  and  power- 
worshippers,  of  its  glory-talkers  and  debaters  of 
prestige,  inventors  of  wounds  in  the  national  van 
ity,  moral  idiots  of  the  beau  geste,  people  with 
patriotic  proud-flesh,  Buncombes  and  Bobadils  and 
royalists  of  France,  and  American  manifest-d'estin- 
arians,  glorifiers  of  a  provincial  grudge,  exploiters 
of  a  mean  and  proximate  past  with  no  basis  in  a 
true  tradition — this  mere  combing  of  them  out 
into  common  heaps  as  common  nuisances  to  na 
tions^ — who  knows  that  it  might  not  work  of  itself 
some  miracle  of  mutual  comprehension? 

A  progressive  writer  in  his  latest  volume,  on 
the  world's  future,  is  madder  in  his  dreams  of 
universal  democracy  than  he  was  in  the  volume  be- 


INTERNATIONAL  CANCELLATION     91 

fore.  The  peoples  of  the  earth  are  all  alike  every 
where,  he  seems  to  say,  and  if  you  break  down 
the  political  dykes  that  divide  them,  they  will  all 
flow  together  in  a  sea.  There  are  no  real  moral 
frontiers,  or  religious,  ethnic,  intellectual,  or 
economic  ones,  and  there  are  no  real  differences 
rooted  in  the  past.  No  nation  ought  to  have  a 
past  peculiar  to  it,  says  he;  it  is  a  foolish  thing 
invented  by  the  soothsayers.  Nations  should  have 
a  common  past  and  listen  only  to  their  common 
story,  and  try  to  forget  their  own  peculiar  yarns, 
mere  family  gossip  for  the  most  part.  Forget 
who  your  father  was  and  try  and  realize  that 
your  brother  is  a  Calmuck;  and  if  the  thing  is 
done  with  a  good  will  all  round,  think  of  the 
warmth  of  the  universal  intimacy. 

I  confess  I  have  not  much  hope  of  an  early  ad 
vent  of  this  universal  warmth.  Even  Englishmen, 
Frenchmen,  and  Americans  do  not  look  alike  to 
me,  despite  the  large,  impressive,  undeniably 
cordial  and  brotherly  circumstance  that  all  of 
them  are  bipecfs;  and  I  am  no  more  capable  of 
surveying  them  with  the  super-patriotic  eye  of  this 
detached  observer  than  I  am  of  taking  the  point 
of  view  of  an  angel  flying  over  them. 

But  the  attitude  of  this  writer  seems  to  me  in 
one  respect  mundane  and  even  practical.  If  peo 
ple  are  not  so  much  alike  as  he  says  they  are,  at 
least  they  are  less  unlike  than  anyone  would  sup- 


92     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

pose  them  to  be  from  the  language  of  the  inter 
national  impressionists;  and  since  these  folk  are 
forever  inventing  imaginary  differences,  it  seems 
worth  while,  in  the  interest  of  international  com 
ity,  to  emphasize  a  point  of  likeness  now  and  then, 
perhaps  even  to  exaggerate  it. 

Since  the  international  impressionists  never  have 
any  reason  for  their  impressions  of  the  respective 
nations  that  they  write  about,  why  not  follow 
the  instincts  of  humanity  and  be  equally  well  im 
pressed  by  them  all?  For  a  moment  at  least,  that 
is  the  logical  consequence  of  reading  them.  After 
reading  a  sufficient  quantity  of  the  language  of 
international  comparisons  I  am  forced  for  a  short 
time  almost  into  an  attitude  of  brotherly  love, 
owing  to  the  lack  of  proper  food  for  hatred. 


THE     LESSONS     OF    LITERARY     WAR 

LOSSES 

Several  good  British  writers  apologized  during 
the  war  because  for  one  reason  or  another  they 
could  not  keep  all  their  literary  work  on  a  war 
footing.  One  of  them,  for  example,  author  of 
a  number  of  agreeable  novels  in  the  spirit  of 
Anthony  Trollope,  thought  it  necessary  to  notice 
the  complaint  of  certain  critics  that  his  pleasant 
story  about  life  in  an  English  country  house  was 
an  "anachronism" — presumably  because  no  shells 
dropped  on  it.  He  tried  to  reason  with  these 
monomaniacs,  arguing  that  interest  in  quiet  things 
is  not  obsolete  even  in  war  time  and  that  a  novel 
ist  may  legitimately  go  on  doing  the  sort  of  thing 
that  he  thinks  he  can  do  the  best.  It  would  seem 
to  a  sane  person  fairly  obvious. 

Reasonable  people  at  that  time  were  not  blam 
ing  novelists  because  their  writings  were  not  con 
cerned  immediately  with  war.  On  the  contrary, 
they  were  rather  saddened  by  the  too  palpable 
effects  of  the  war  on  the  work  of  many  of  their 
gifted  contemporaries.  From  the  point  of  view 
of  man  power  it  may  have  been  desirable  to  get 
a  novelist  into  the  war,  but  from  the  point  of 

93 


94    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

view  of  literary  advantage  it  was  found  after 
three  years'  experience  that  it  was  often  undesir 
able  to  get  the  war  into  a  novelist.  Of  course,  a 
regiment  of  novelists  marching  to  the  front,  each 
determined  to  bring  down  a  German,  might  'have 
been  a  cheering  spectacle,  but  the  sight  of  those 
novelists  all  marching  home,  each  determined  to 
bring  out  at  least  one  war  novel  and  possibly  two, 
would  have  been  on  the  whole  depressing. 

For  it  was  clear  to  any  one  who  looked  into  the 
matter  at  all  closely  that  one  of  the  disasters  of 
the  war  was  the  fancied  necessity  of  writing  about 
it  on  the  part  of  persons  who  were  manifestly 
designed  by  nature  for  something  else.  On  read 
ing  an  article  by  Mr.  Kipling,  for  example,  it  was 
impossible  to  escape  the  conclusion  that  the  loss  to 
letters  was  far  more  serious  than  the  damage  it 
did  to  the  enemy's  cause.  Fill  an  author  with  a 
titanic  theme  and  you  do  not  make  him  titanic; 
you  often  merely  burst  him ;  and  one  could  scarcely 
turn  the  pages  of  a  serious  magazine  during  the 
war  without  stumbling  over  the  ruins  of  what  had 
once  been  a  man  of  letters.  The  fact  that  they 
had  perished  nobly  did  not  console  me  for  their 
having  gone  to  pieces,  nor  do  I  think  it  unfair  to 
raise  the  question  now  whether  they  perished 
needfully. 

Consider,  for  example,  the  case  of  a  brilliant 
British  writer,  who,  I  believe,  wrote  against  the 


LITERARY  WAR  LOSSES  95 

Germans  about  once  a  week  after  the  war  began 
and  was  unable  to  break  the  habit  off  till  two 
years  after  the  war  had  ended.  He  acquired  the 
ability  of  hating  the  Germans  all  through  the 
Middle  Ages.  He  could  hate  all  of  Prussia  from 
the  earliest  times  down  to  the  present  moment, 
and  all  the  Teutonic  Knights,  and  every  minute 
in  the  life  of  each  Elector  of  Brandenburg.  If 
shells  were  bursting  on  the  women  of  his  neigh 
borhood,  he  would  attack  at  once  and  with  the 
utmost  fury  the  character  of  Frederick  the  Great, 
and  in  the  course  of  the  same  article  in  his  London 
weekly  paper  he  would  find  time  also  for  an  un 
favorable  mention  of  the  writings  of  Walter  von 
der  Vogelweide.  Now,  his  feeling  toward  the 
Germans  was  precisely  my  own  and  that  of  almost 
every  one  I  knew,  and  I  need  not  say  that  any 
havoc  he  may  have  wrought  among  the  Germans 
was  welcome  to  me.  I  did  not  wish  to  see  the 
Germans  escape  from  this  agreeable  writer.  But 
I  should  have  liked  to  see  him  escape  from  the 
Germans  if  it  had  been  compatible  with  the  public 
interest,  and  I  raise  the  question  whether,  if  he 
had  done  so  from  time  to  time,  many  of  them 
would  after  all  have  really  got  away.  For,  natur 
ally  enough,  in  writing  constantly  upon  so  mo 
notonous  a  subject  as  the  moral  defects  of  this 
morally  primitive  people  this  writer  fell  into  a 
sort  of  rudimentary  routine.  It  was  impossible 


96     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

to  write  against  the  German  morals  as  we  knew 
them  without  being  rudimentary,  for  you  were 
addressing  them,  so  to  speak,  from  the  threshold 
of  civilized  life.  It  was  as  if  you  were  contem 
plating  the  original  ape-man  in  circumstances  so 
acute  that  even  an  anthropological  interest  in  him 
was,  for  the  moment,  impossible. 

The  Germans  as  we  understood  them  at  that 
moment  were  not  a  subject  around  which  the  im 
agination  of  a  civilized  man  really  cared  to  play. 
As  the  daily  news  of  pillage,  rape,  assassination, 
and  mendacity  arrived,  (and  no  exceptions  to 
these  rules  were  ever  published)  curiosity  about 
them  was  soon  sated  and  interest  in  them,  though 
for  the  moment  keen,  was  of  so  elementary  a  nat 
ure  as  hardly  to  admit  of  a  varied  literary  ex 
pression.  A  rather  coarse  cartoon  was  a  suffici 
ently  delicate  reply  to  the  most  subtle  diplomatic 
language  of  a  German  statesman.  In  short,  the 
entire  situation  from  the  moral  point  of  view  was, 
one  may  say,  extremely  crude. 

So  it  happened  that  the  monotonous  succession 
of  barbarities  by  which  this  morally  backward 
people  made  its  presence  felt  each  week  evoked 
from  this  writer  each  week  a  monotonous  succes 
sion  of  ejaculatory  moral  sounds,  which  were  no 
doubt  suited  to  the  nature  of  the  subject,  but 
which,  I  believe,  could  have  been  just  as  compet 
ently  rendered  by  a  large  number  of  persons,  not 


LITERARY  WAR  LOSSES  97 

one  of  whom  could  do  certain  valuable  other 
things  which  this  writer  was  capable  of  doing. 
And  therein  lay  the  waste.  Of  course  he  acquired 
great  facility.  Waked  up  suddenly  out  of  a  sound 
sleep,  he  could  begin  instantly,  "Another  brutal 

aspect  of  the  burning  of  babies  alive  is "  and 

finish  the  article  almost  mechanically.  But  I  be 
lieve  almost  any  one  could  have  been  trained  to 
find  the  brutal  aspects  of  the  burning  of  babies 
alive. 

Let  us  suppose  the  Germans  had  taken  another 
backward  step — a  step  not  difficult  to  imagine,  and 
one  that  they  might  have  taken  had  the  general 
staff  thought  it  desirable.  Suppose  that  proceed 
ing  logically  from  the  idea  attributed  to  the  Kaiser 
that  "For  me  humanity  is  bounded  by  the  Vosges," 
they  had  actually  regarded  all  people  to  the  west 
of  the  Vosges,  in  common  with  other  animals,  as 
material  for  food  and  that  cannibalism  among 
them  became  as  well  established  and  as  customary 
a  thing  in  our  estimation  as,  say,  the  murder  of  a 
woman  or  a  child. 

The  fact  that  the  Germans  ate  their  prisoners, 
let  us  say,  received  among  the  Allied  nations  all 
the  attention  that  such  a  subject  naturally  would 
deserve.  Imagine  it  displayed  everywhere  on 
posters,  noted  in  state  messages,  recorded  in 
minute  detail  in  the  daily  press,  and  assuming  its 
proportionate  share  in  ordinary  conversation — 


98     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

in  short,  taking  firm  hold  of  the  common  mind. 
In  these  circumstances  it  seems  to  me  doubtful  that 
any  great  amount  of  literary  talent  need  have 
been  devoted  merely  to  showing  that  the  course 
of  the  Germans  was  objectionable. 

The  case  against  cannibalism  need  not  have 
been  made  out  with  any  great  skill  and  could 
have  been  safely  left  to  much  more  commonplace 
persons  than  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton,  Professor 
Gilbert  Murray,  Maurice  Donnay,  M.  Albert 
Capus,  M.  Pierre  Loti,  and  many  other  essayists, 
novelists,  playwrights,  and  scholars  whose  person 
alities  during  the  war  were  not  to  be  distinguished 
from  any  other  portion  of  the  newspaper.  Sir 
Gilbert  Parker  need  not  have  sent  me  and  every 
one  else  in  my  office  building  a  handsome,  care 
fully  prepared  pamphlet  answering  the  Hin- 
denburg-Ludendorff  defense  of  cannibalism  on 
grounds  of  military  necessity,  and  Mr.  William 
Archer  would  not  have  had  to  develop  with  any 
particular  ability  his  reply  to  the  philosophic  con 
tention  of  Professor  Oswald,  Professor  Haeckel, 
and  other  leaders  of  German  thought,  that  the 
eating  by  Teutons  of  a  non-Teutonic  race  was  not 
to  be  considered  as  cannibalism. 

The  argument  of  Count  von  Reventlow  that 
cannibalism  was  the  corollary  of  pan-Germanism, 
necessarily  involved  in  the  very  conception  of  the 
Germanic  absorption  of  inferior  races,  though  ad- 


LITERARY  WAR  LOSSES  99 

mittedly  logical,  would  probably  not  have  required 
an  elaborate  reply.  And  as  more  of  our  fellow 
citizens  found  their  way  to  the  German  sideboard 
the  less  need  there  would  be  that  the  ablest  men 
of  letters  of  their  time  should  devote  their  en 
ergies  to  the  bald  and  iterative  expression  of  anti- 
cannibal  views.  I  do  not  mean  that  they  should 
not  have  written  against  cannibalism  if  they  had 
wished  to.  I  merely  mean  that  to  judge  by  an 
alogies  their  longest  essays  might  have  been  less 
effective  than  the  simple  publication  of  a  German 
bill  of  fare. 

People  foresaw  in  a  general  way  the  literary 
effects  of  the  war.  They  knew  that  it  was  likely 
to  devastate  light  literature  in  the  fighting  nations, 
but  they  could  not  have  anticipated  the  startling 
concrete  results.  They  knew,  of  course,  that  an 
essayist  hit  by  a  bomb  would  cease  writing,  but 
they  could  have  had  no  idea  that  the  essayists  who 
were  not  hit  would  be  so  strangely  altered  when 
they  went  on  writing.  There  was  no  external  scar 
on  the  persons  of  dozens  of  eminent  writers,  who 
had  presumably  remained  in  perfectly  safe  places 
and  suffered  none  of  the  privations  of  war;  yet 
from  the  reader's  point  of  view  they  were  hardly 
recognizable. 

Before  the  war  it  was  generally  supposed  that 
the  effect  of  a  strong  feeling  upon  a  light  literary 
character  was  on  the  whole  beneficial,  and  there 


ioo     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

are  many  to  this  day  who  argue  that  the  reason 
why  American  light  literature  is  usually  so  very 
light  that  no  one  can  feel  it,  is  because  there  are 
no  strong,  high,  noble  feelings  in  the  writers  them 
selves.  I  have  heard  it  suggested  that  my 
friend,  Mr.  Harold  McChamber  (whose  career 
I  have  sketched  in  another  chapter),  had  he  been 
borne  aloft  on  some  great  tempest  of  emotion, 
would  have  been  George  Meredith — or  just  as 
remarkable — and  that  if  the  inner  life  of  Profes 
sor  Woodside  were  disturbed  a  modern  equiva 
lent  of  Dante's  Inferno  would  emerge. 

But  what  were  the  results  of  shaking  up  dozens 
of  delightful  authors  during  the  war?  Simply, 
that  soon  after  August  4th,  1914,  they  became 
almost  completely  unreadable,  and  have  remained 
so  ever  since. 

This  is  not  said  in  an  unfriendly  spirit.  The 
cause  of  these  writers  was  my  own;  nor  do  I  re 
spect  them  any  less  as  men  for  their  having  rather 
gone  to  pieces  as  writers.  Indeed,  they  may  be 
regarded  as  sufferers  from  internal  injuries  honor 
ably  sustained;  for  the  casualties  of  war  are  subtle 
and  various. 

The  bomb  that  takes  off  a  private's  leg  may 
render  a  good  poet  perfectly  useless  for  several 
months.  Down  went  thousands  of  stout  British 
seamen  in  the  Battle  of  Jutland  and  away  went 
Mr.  Chesterton's  commonsense,  as  he  argued  with 


LITERARY  WAR  LOSSES,^-        ?oi::r, 

some  equally  stricken  German  that  the  fight  was 
not  really  a  German  Salamis,  but,  on  the  contrary, 
a  British  Waterloo.  While  lives  are  nobly  lost  at 
the  front,  wits  are  lost  as  -nobly  in  the  magazines, 
and  after  a  battle  there  are  almost  as  many  mis 
carriages  among  verse  writers  as  among  mothers. 

To  the  right-feeling  reader,  the  foolish  thing 
he  encountered  in  war  time  on  die  formerly  in 
telligent  page  seemed  a  sort  of  literary  lesion, 
patriotically  incurred.  But  he  was  under  no 
obligation  whatever  to  go  on  reading  the  page. 
The  healthy  inner  violence  of  the  writers  did  not 
take  an  adequate  outward  form,  and  the  fact  that 
their  hearts  were  eminently  in  the  right  place, 
afforded  a  moral,  not  a  literary  gratification.  It 
showed  how  vain  are  the  current  recipes  for  the 
amelioriation  of  belles-lettres.  Passion  and  a  high 
purpose,  and  freedom  from  the  least  taint  of  com 
mercialism,  a  great  subject  and  a  stirring  time — 
all  the  ingredients  recommended  by  American 
magazine  critics  for  twenty  years  in  the  recon 
struction  of  the  world's  literature — went  to  the 
making  of  the  very  worst  volumes  that  these  au 
thors  had  as  yet  achieved. 

Scorn  has  been  highly  valued  as  a  literary  mo 
tive,  but  the  sco-rn  of  the  satirist  was  no  longer 
beautiful  in  the  contempt  and  anger  of  his  lip, 
and  when  he  dipped  his  pen  in  gall — a  proceeding 
much  esteemed  by  literary  commentators — the  gall 


102.    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

turned  out  to  be  the  very  thinnest  of  writing  fluids. 
Consecrate  a  litterateur  and  to  your  astonishment 
you  cannot  read  him.  Put  him  in  a  battle  mood 
and  he  gives  you  nothing  to  think  about,  no  ex 
ploding  thought  of  any  use  whatever,  except  per 
haps  to  throw  at  some  enemy  whom  probably  it 
will  not  hurt.  The  lesson  of  the  war  seems  to  be 
adverse  to  all  the  current  theories  of  inspiration 
in  literature.  If  you  inspire  light  literature  too 
much,  apparently,  there  is  merely  a  blow-out. 

This,  by  the  way,  must  dishearten  the  group  of 
critics  and  novelists  who,  at  intervals  these  past 
twenty  years,  have  been  telling  other  critics  and 
novelists  what  is  the  matter  with  them.  The 
amount  of  disagreeable  contemporary  reading 
these  devoted  men  have  forced  themselves  to  do  for 
this  purpose  is  prodigious.  One  of  them  'said  that 
after  'having  gone  through  all  the  contemporary 
writings  of  France,  Russia  and  Germany,  and 
found  them  rather  bad,  he  read  everything  at  all 
tiresome  in  America,  and  found  it  worse  yet.  An 
other  not  only  knows  the  exact  difference  between 
Mr.  Harold  McChamber  and  Mr.  Curtis  Lane — 
which  of  itself  is  rather  a  subtle  matter — but  he 
can  tell  to  a  dot  why  and  how  much  they  both  fall 
short  of  genius. 

Mr.  Barton  Worcester  says  the  novels  of  Mr. 
Harold  McChamber  are  "shams;"  mere  "puddles 
of  words,"  "stale,  distorted"  and  full  of  "mil- 


LITERARY  WAR  LOSSES  103 

dewed  pap,"  but  he  can  pass  the  stiffest  sort  of 
examination  in  them  all,  and  will  quote  you  page 
after  page  of  the  longest,  evidently  having  learned 
them  by  heart.  He  knows  why  Mr.  Harold  Mc- 
Chamber  is  so  much  worse  than  Mrs.  Pauline 
McHenry  Donald — he  even  knows  why  each  of 
them  exists — and  he  has  solved  a  hundred  other 
just  such  knotty  problems.  You  cannot  help  ad 
miring  these  conscientious,  indefatigable  men, 
going  on  and  on  against  their  wills,  borrowing 
novels  from  the  cook;  following  up  the  elevator 
boy  and  becoming  learned  in  the  subject  of  his 
literary  contemplations.  But  you  cannot  help 
rather  pitying  them. 

Now,  the  result  of  all  this  hard  labor  and  liter 
ary  anguish  may  be  summed  up  quite  simply.  The 
faults  of  American  writings,  according  to  these 
critics,  all  arise  from  the  lack  of  proper  motives 
in  the  writer.  They  do  not  say  it  in  so  many 
words,  but  they  plainly  imply  a  genuine  belief  that 
if  they  could  substitute  some  of  their  own  better 
moral  and  artistic  purposes  for  the  present  motives 
of  any  novelist,  however  silly,  that  novelist  would 
soon  become  quite  sensible. 

One  critic  is  certain  that  if  the  American  novel 
ist  would  stop  caring  so  much  about  old  women 
and  little  boys  he  would  surely  be  considered  a 
much  better  artist. 

A  second  critic  believes  that  if  authors  would 


104    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

be  less  anxious  to  appear  orthodox  and  cease  con 
spiring  to  suppress  all  mention  of  the  sexual  re 
lation  they  would  improve.  A  third  critic  thinks 
inner  freedom  is  the  certain  cure.  And  one  thing 
follows  from  the  arguments  of  all  of  them  as 
absolutely  certain:  Extract  the  commercial  mo 
tive  from  any  author,  however  bad,  and  he  will 
be  bettered. 

There  is  not  the  slightest  foundation  for  any 
one  of  these  beliefs,  as  the  lesson  of  the  war  re 
minds  us.  Too  many  gifted  authors  were,  with  a 
lofty  purpose  for  a  splendid  cause,  writing  com 
plete  nonsense.  Too  plain  was  it,  even  among 
writers  at  one  time  quite  remarkable,  that  moral 
exaltation  is  often  followed  by  literary  decay.  As 
to  the  harmless,  ordinary  American  author,  over 
whom  the  critics  above  cited  have  toiled  so  hard, 
there  is  no  help  for  him  from  their  methods.  On 
the  contrary,  if  they  had  their  way  with  him,  they 
would  simply  make  him  uncomfortable  without 
benefiting  the  reading  public  in  the  least.  Why 
free  the  inner  life  of  Mr.  Harold  McChamber, 
when  in  all  aesthetic  probability  none  of  it  could 
escape?  Suppose  Mr.  Harold  McChamber  gave 
himself  up  utterly  to  Mr.  Worcester;  went  to  a 
lonely  place  with  him  and  listened  every  day,  and 
Mr.  Worcester  really  interested  him  in  Shake 
speare  or  Mr.  Ezra  Pound,  and  tugged  and 
heaved  him  toward  the  higher  plane,  Mr.  Me- 


LITERARY  WAR  LOSSES  105 

Chamber  in  no  wise  resisting;  suppose  finally  that 
the  white  flame  of  Mr.  Worcester  actually  passed 
over  into  Mr.  McChamber.  Mr.  McChamber's 
artistic  substance  being  the  same,  there  would  be 
no  change  in  his  manner  of  writing,  and  the  small, 
discerning  class  of  readers  whom  Mr.  Worcester 
has  in  mind  would  probably  never  know  that  Mr. 
McChamber  was  burning  bright  inside.  It  simply 
would  cost  Mr.  McChamber  five  million  readers 
and  fill  him  with  a  violent  emotion  which  he  lacked 
completely  the  ability  to  express. 

In  fact,  it  is  a  rash  man  who  in  view  of  the 
lesson  of  the  war,  will  recommend  any  definite 
external  or  internal  crisis  for  the  amelioration  of 
any  author — good  or  bad.  The  most  agreeable 
authors  of  die  time  went  monotonously  insane  un 
der  conditions  which,  on  the  principle  of  a  great 
body  of  current  literary  comment  should  have  im 
proved  them. 


ON  BEHALF  OF  MR.  HAROLD  MC- 
CHAMBER 

In  those  exalted  circles  where  the  condition  of 
American  popular  novelists  is  regarded  wieh  grave 
concern,  it  is  assumed  that  certain  of  them  have 
stooped  to  conquer.  It  is  assumed  that  they  were 
at  one  time  capable  of  a  higher  class  of  work  but 
deliberately  turned  away  from  it  to  pander  to 
the  public.  It  would  almost  seem  from  some  of 
these  articles  that  the  novelist  before  becoming 
popular  has  a  battle  with  his  conscience,  saying  to 
himself  in  so  many  words,  "Shall  I  pander?"  and 
then  after  a  brief  struggle  answering  "Yea." 
Then  he  sells  one  'hundred  thousand  copies  and 
is  lost  to  Art. 

I  have  sometimes  become  quite  sentimental 
about  him  on  reading  these  articles  for  it  would 
appear  from  them  that  the  poor  creature  really 
knows  how  low  he  is  and  must  suffer  a  good  deal 
from  remorse,  even  while  outwardly  cheerful. 
Yet  the  situation  cannot  be  so  bad  as  that.  Indeed 
there  is  evidence  that  the  situation  does  not  exist 
at  all,  outside  the  minds  of  these  critics.  Let  us 
take  the  following  instance,  for  which  a  parallel 
can  be  found  by  any  one  who  looks  for  it : 

106 


HAROLD  McCHAMBER  107 

Mr.  Harold  W.  McCh amber,  of  stout  com 
mercial  stock  crossed  now  and  then  with  a  Baptist 
clergyman,  was  born  at  South  Bend,  Indiana,  in 
1873,  graduated  at  Cornell  University,  wrote  for 
no  matter  what  newspaper  and  no  matter  where, 
and  achieved  his  first  literary  success,  a  very  mod 
est  one,  some  twenty  years  ago,  witJh  the  publica 
tion  of  Sally  of  the  Bogs.  This  was  an  intensive 
study  in  ashen  grey  realism,  which  won  immedi 
ately  a  succes  dy  estime  for  the  extraordinary  ver 
acity  of  its  local  color.  Not  one  serious  reviewer 
failed  to  remark  on  its  "atmosphere"  or  to  say 
that  it  was  "convincing"  or  to  discern  unmistak 
able  "signs  of  promise"  in  the  author. 

Miss  Edna  Ladell  in  the  New  York  Times 
Saturday  Supplement  after  saying  that  it  at  once 
made  her  "sit  up"  declared:  "The  reality  of  it 
all  grips,  compels,  fascinates,  overmasters. 
Everywhere  the  great  devouring,  permeating,  ob 
sessing  bog.  You  see  it,  smell  it,  taste  it.  Every 
where  the  suck  of  the  mud,  the  splash  of  the  frog, 
the  cry  of  the  bittern,  the  glint  of  twilight  on  the 
pools,  blackened  stumps,  moss,  dank  leaves, 
turtles,  the  smell  of  decaying  roots  and  wet  shoe- 
leather.  And  the  lives  of  the  simple  characters 
are  bog-driven,  bog-confined.  With  supreme 
artistry  he  has  given  us  an  actual  slice  of  raw  drip 
ping,  oozy  bog-life.  A  veritable  masterpiece." 

Except  for  a  writer  in  the  New  York  Sun  who 


io&    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

called  it  an  "unpleasant  story  of  mud  and  rheuma 
tism"  almost  every  other  reviewer  seemed  grate 
ful  for  the  way  it  brought  the  bog  home  to  him; 
and  the  late  Mr.  W.  D.  Howells  in  a  cordial  let 
ter  to  the  author  said  that  as  an  authentic  por 
trayal  of  an  Indiana  bog  community  it  was  un 
paralleled  in  American  fiction.  He  compared  it  to 
Miss  Edith  Bamborough's  picture  of  mid-Tennes 
see  mill-town  life,  to  Mrs.  Buxby's  powerful  grasp 
of  the  southern  Georgia  sand-hill  country,  to  Miss 
Amy  Barton's  mastery  of  northwestern  Connecti 
cut  upland  farm  society,  and  to  Mr.  John  D.  Pott's 
remarkable  realization  of  the  atmosphere  of  the 
Erie  Canal.  He  applauded  Mr.  McChamber's 
courageous  break  with  the  cheap  traditions  of  con 
ventional  romance,  and  urged  him  to  continue 
as  he  had  begun,  saying  in  conclusion,  "  You 
have  made  that  little  corner  of  the  land  your 


own." 


Mr.  McChamber  did  not,  as  is  well  known,  con 
tinue  as  he  had  begun,  but  on  the  contrary  within 
less  than  two  years  produced  one  of  the  six  best- 
selling  historical  novels  of  the  period  and  from 
that  time  to  this  has  repeated  that  success  at  sur 
prisingly  short  and  regular  intervals.  Also,  as  is 
well  known,  in  gaining  this  vast  new  audience  he 
lost  that  penetrating  old  one  which  had  discerned 
the  beauty  of  Sally  of  the  Bogs;  and  henceforth 
if  serious  reviewers  noticed  him,  it  was  to  contrast 


HAROLD  McCHAMBER  109 

his  early  artistic  endeavor  with  his  present  com 
mercial  achievement. 

In  literary  circles  his  work  was  soon  taken  as 
typical  of  those  broad,  low  levels  that  a  discrimin 
ating  taste  will  instinctively  avoid.  When  one  said 
the  "Harold  McChamber  sort  of  thing,"  it  was 
sufficient.  Whenever  one  American  writer  de 
plored  in  a  serious  American  magazine  the  in 
feriority  of  all  other  American  writers  he  almost 
always  included  Harold  McChamber's  novels 
among  the  things  that  made  him  sad,  and  in  every 
article  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  on  the  commercial 
squalor  of  contemporary  novelists  Mr.  McCham- 
ber's  name  was  on  tihe  list  of  those  whom  money 
had  depraved. 

To  read  Harold  McChamber  was  equivalent  to 
saying  "pants,"  tucking  a  napkin  in  the  collar, 
vocalizing  sneezes,  vocalizing  yawns,  chewing 
gum,  naming  a  child  Gwendolen,  having  a  popper 
and  a  mommer  and  a  parlor  with  the  "September 
Morn"  hanging  in  it,  and  a  husband  who  is  always 
"he,"  a  wife  who  is  always  "she,"  and  children 
who  always  are  the  "little  tots"  or  "kiddies." 

Not  that  the  people  who  read  Harold  McCham 
ber  necessarily  did  these  things.  On  the  contrary 
a  great  many  of  his  readers  were  precisely  of  the 
class  that  would  scorn  them  the  most.  But  had 
their  social  discernment  remained  on  the  same 
level  as  their  literary  taste,  as  evidenced  by  this 


i  iQ    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

liking  for  Harold  McChamber  they  would  have 
done  these  things  and  worse. 

As  to  Mr.  McChamber  these  critics  would  not 
admit  that  he  might  have  fallen  by  accident  to 
this  low  plane  of  vulgar  entertainment,  or  that  by 
natural  abilities  and  inclination  he  might  have  sim 
ply  gravitated  to  it.  They  clearly  implied  that 
Mr.  McChamber  had  deliberately,  guiltily  de 
scended  to  it,  stopping  his  ears  to  the  divine  voices 
that  bade  him  stay  on  high. 

Now  Mr.  Harold  McChamber,  whom  I  may 
say,  in  passing,  I  have  known  intimately  for  many 
years,  is  the  last  man  in  the  world  to  have  had 
any  such  complication  in  his  inner  life.  In  writing 
his  books  he  never  passed  consciously  from  a  high 
plane  to  a  low  one,  or  stifled  an  artistic  impulse  or 
battled  with  his  higher  self  or  lowered  his  stand 
ard  to  suit  the  taste  of  other  people. 

The  simple  truth  about  Mr.  McChamber  is  that 
his  own  taste  and  that  of  an  enormous  number  of 
other  people  turned  out  to  be  just  alike.  He  never 
had  to  study  the  people's  demand,  because  he  de 
manded  what  they  did.  He,  too,  liked  Ruritanias 
at  the  same  time  that  other  people  liked  them 
and  with  real  enthusiasm  he  made  one.  He,  too, 
liked  to  read  about  a  corrupt  man  who  ran  for 
office,  so  he  made  one  run. 

When  people  were  fond  of  strong,  primitive 
heroes  in  wild  places,  he,  too,  was  fond  of  them. 


HAROLD  McCHAMBER  in 

He  did  not  in  a  spirit  of  low  commercial  cunning 
compound  those  iron-backed  creatures  with  four 
moral  qualities  and  the  love  of  nature  in  their 
souls.  The  call  of  the  wild  really  called  him  also. 
And  the  democratic  "urge"  really  did  urge  him 
when  its  turn  came  round,  and  as  soon  as  religious 
unrest  appeared  in  the  magazines  'he,  too,  became 
religiously  unrestful  just  in  the  nick  of  time. 

Knowing  Mr.  McChamber  personally,  I  deny 
absolutely  that  an  attempt  on  his  part  to  climb 
a  high  and  steep  artistic  acclivity  would  have  had 
any  advantage  whatsoever.  It  would  have  re 
sulted  in  dislocation,  not  ascent.  It  is  not  true 
that  the  fidelity  of  the  local  color  in  Sally  of  the 
Bogs  made  it,  from  an  artistic  point  of  view,  re 
markable.  The  only  remarkable  thing  about  it 
was  the  thoroughness  with  whidh  the  local  color 
was  laid  on.  Reviewers  at  that  time,  hospitable  to 
good  intentions  in  that  field,  always  mistook  pho 
tography  for  description.  It  was  their  habit,  too, 
to  find  signs  of  promise.  Hardly  any  of  their 
coming  writers  ever  came.  And  that  was  the  best 
that  even  t)his  little  group  could  say  for  him — that 
he  was  coming — whereas  within  a  month  after  the 
publication  of  Captain  Bludstone,  Mr.  McCharn- 
bers  received  fifteen  hundred  letters  from  de 
lighted  readers  who  believed  he  had  already  come, 
and  he  had  a  keener  pleasure  in  producing  it. 

"When  I  wrote  Sally/'  he  said,  "I  toiled  over 


1 1 21    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

it;  when  I  wrote  Bludstone  I  really  felt  inspired.'1 
He  said  'he  could  not  get  that  scene  between  the 
hero  and  the  wounded  tiger  out  of  his  mind  for 
days.  He  considered  it  as  strong  as  anything  he 
had  ever  written,  except  that  one  in  The  Boiling 
Fat,  where  the  poor  young  man,  with  the  square 
jaw  and  the  honest  grey  eyes  that  seemed  to  look 
you  through,  faces  the  powerful  president  of  the 
Big  Three  System  and  says  just  what  he  thinks  of 
him,  knowing  that  it  will  cost  him  his  place  and 
destroy  his  chance  of  marrying  the  president's 
daughter — slightly  above  the  middle  height,  brown 
eyes  with  a  glint  of  gold  in  them,  color  that  came 
and  went,  tawny  hair  with  a  trick  of  straying  over 
the  tips  of  the  delicate  ears,  a  light  carriage  as  if 
poised  for  flight,  and  a  rippling  laugh.  In  short, 
Mr.  McChamber  has  never  had  to  study  the  arts 
of  popularity.  He  has  what  may  be  called  a  rep 
resentative  nature.  I  have  seen  in  his  morning's 
mail  after  a  new  novel  letters  from  an  ex-President, 
two  Senators,  two  relatives  of  the  Vanderbilt  fam 
ily,  five  elevator  boys,  two  out  of  the  forty  im 
mortals  in  our  National  Academy,  and  one  brake- 
man  on  the  Elevated  Railway.  And  in  achieving 
this  he  has  never  swerved  a  hair's  breadth  from 
the  path  of  his  literary  inclinations.  His  mind 
spontaneously  contains  the  very  thoughts  that 
would  have  been  elected  to  it,  had  the  people 
voted  on  its  contents. 


SUBSIDIZING  AUTHORS 

I  have  never  been  able  to  understand  the  reason 
ing  of  those  kind-hearted  people  who  from  time 
to  time  recommend,  seemingly  in  all  seriousness, 
the  subsidizing  of  the  deserving  poor  among 
American  authors.  As  a  writer  my  mouth  waters 
at  the  thought  of  it,  but  I  carniot  with  a  clear 
conscience  urge  it.  One's  humanity  would  be  torn 
in  two  by  the  problem  presented  in  its  application. 
To  clothe  a  naked  author  would  be  an  act  of  per 
sonal  kindness;  it  would  also  be,  very  likely,  an 
act  of  public  cruelty.  If,  for  example,  a  commit 
tee  of  the  Academy  of  Arts  and  Letters  were  to 
set  out  regularly  to  rescue  all  the  mute,  inglorious 
Miltons,  the  result  while  pleasing  to  the  Miltons 
might  be  exceedingly  disagreeable  to  everybody 
else  owing  to  the  committee's  probable  taste  in 
Miltons.  How  do  these  wise  men  know  that  a 
committee  for  saving  more  authors  from  starva 
tion  would  really  be  any  better  for  the  literary 
situation  than  a  committee  for  causing  more  au 
thors  to  starve,  or  that  a  committee  for  endowing 
authors  to  continue  writing  would  work  out  more 
desirably  than  a  cormnittee  that  endowed  them  to 
stop  ? 

113 


1 14    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

I  say  committee,  of  course,  because  we  always 
carry  out  by  committee  anything  in  which  any  one 
of  us  alone  would  be  too  reasonable  to  persist. 
Alone,  after  a  few  trials,  one  would  probably  come 
to  his  senses,  but  in  a  committee  we  come  to  one 
another's  senses,  which  is  merely  a  convivial  man 
ner  of  going  out  of  our  own.  It  is  not  that  the 
plan  looks  merely  to  the  preservation  of  an  author 
as  a  man.  It  looks  to  his  continuance  as  an  author. 
Mad  decisions  of  this  sort  could  be  taken  only  in 
committee. 

It  is  different  with  other  occupations.  Toward 
bank-clerks,  for  instance,  one  could  be  cooperatively 
humane  without  endangering  to  any  great  extent 
the  mental  lives  of  other  people.  A  "nation-wide" 
bank-clerk  life-saving  service  would  be  no  more 
invidious  or  unreasonable  than  many  other  civic 
bodies  now  existing,  and  it  might  perhaps  with 
safety  go  further  than  simply  pulling  bank-clerks 
out  of  water  and  drying  them.  In  might  even 
take  measures  to  aid  them  to  return  to  bank-clerk 
ing.  Even  a  committee  could  probably  tell  not 
only  whether  a  bank-clerk  ought  to  live  but 
whether  he  ought  to  be  a  bank-<rlerk. 

But  suppose  seven  novelists,  while  looking  for 
a  democratic  "urge,"  fall  into  the  Harlem  River, 
and  are  drawn  out  by  some  committee  on  the  con 
servation  of  deserving  fiction.  Beyond  the  work 
of  complete  resuscitation  the  committee  obviously 


SUBSIDIZING  AUTHORS  115 

has  no  right  to  go.  To  restore  those  novelists 
warmed  and  comforted  to  their  respective  fami 
lies,  without  regard  to  the  quality  of  their  literary 
work,  is  defensible  on  grounds  of  common  human 
ity.  It  pertains  to  the  preservation  of  human  life. 
But  one  step  beyond  that  point,  one  single  measure 
for  aiding  and  abetting  any  or  all  of  them  in  the 
writing  of  novels  would  carry  the  committee  into 
a  subtle  and  dubious  domain  requiring  fine,  far- 
seeing  discriminations  such  as  no  American  com 
mittee  on  any  subject  has  ever  been  known  to  pos 
sess.  It  pertains  to  the  preservation  of  a  literary 
life. 

The  bodies  of  those  seven  novelists,  whirling  in 
the  tide  underneath  the  arches  of  High  Bridge, 
would  be,  I  admit,  a  pathetic  sight,  no  matter 
what  they  had  written.  But  only  so  long  as  they 
were  regarded  merely  as  men.  If  they  were  re 
garded  exclusively  as  novelists  and  from  a  strictly 
literary  point  of  view,  the  occasion  might  be  al 
most  joyous.  So  little  can  one  say  in  any  long 
view  of  the  matter  whether  their  survival  as  active 
novelists  would  do  more  good  than  harm  to  the 
human  spirit.  One  man's  life  may  be  dearly  pur 
chased  at  the  price  of  ten  thousand  ennuis.  I  do 
not  deny  that  the  committee  migiht  do  literature  a 
service  by  hitting  once  and  again  on  the  right 
novelist  to  conserve;  but  so  might  a  lightming- 
stroke  by  killing  the  right  one.  Why  add  one 


1 1 61    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

blind  chance  to  another  in  the  hope  of  coming  out 
straight  in  this  ratiher  delicate  affair? 

Or  take  a  case  which  would  seem  to  me  wholly 
deserving  and  in  which  I  ought  certainly  to  sym 
pathize  with  the  subsidizing  point  of  view.  Hav 
ing  nearly  finished  my  book  on  "The  Religion  of 
Inexperience,"  a  constructive  work  in  moral  eradi 
cation,  written  with  energy  and  vision,  seizing  pos 
terity's  thought  by  the  forelock  but  transcending 
somewhat  the  mental  powers  of  my  contempo 
raries,  I  appear  one  morning  with  my  six  starving 
children  at  the  Anne  Street  Headquarters  of  the 
Rockefeller  Committee  on  Indoor  Literary  Relief. 
It  turns  out  better  than  I  could  have  hoped.  Not 
only  am  I  tided  over  my  present  difficulties,  but 
three  weeks  later  there  is  a  meeting  of  two  college 
presidents,  a  professor  of  sociology,  a  writer  of  a 
successful  novel,  an  historian,  and  the  director  of 
a  bank,  and  out  of  fhe  confluence  of  these  six 
intellects  there  comes,  as  indeed  anything  might 
come,  a  decision  in  my  favor. 

"The  Religion  of  Inexperience"  is  achieved, 
published  in  four  volumes,  respectfully  considered. 
I  find  people  polite  and  not  unwilling  to  admit 
that  I  may  be  passing  on  to  posterity.  As  I  have 
the  reputation  of  writing  over  everybody's  head, 
giants  arise  from  time  to  time  and  say  they  under 
stand  me  and  from  my  own  point  of  view  and 
that  of  several  others  the  world  has  gained  a 


SUBSIDIZING  AUTHORS  1 1 7 

great  deal.  Yet  if  I  apply  in  an  unselfish  spirit 
the  law  of  literary  probabilities  the  odds  seem  to 
run  the  other  way.  The  other  things  I  might 
have  done  better  are  so  numerous.  At  no  stage 
of  the  whole  affair,  for  example,  has  there  been 
the  slightest  indication  that  God  did  not  really 
mean  me  for  a  plumber  or  that  that  was  not  the 
true  reason  why  I  almost  starved.  Had  I  starved 
a  little  longer,  I  might  in  desperation  or  moved 
by  some  wayward  impulse  have  begun  to  plumb, 
discovered  a  real  passion  and  talent  for  the  art, 
earned  my  own  living  by  it  instead  of  by  puzzling 
people  to  no  purpose,  and  so  the  ending  would 
have  been  much  happier  all  around.  Misplace 
ments  of  this  sort  are  always  occurring  in  letters, 
and  committees  do  not  readjust  them. 

We  seem  to  be  as  much  at  sea  in  this  matter 
as  they  were  about  120  A.D.,  when  the  critic 
cursed  the  town  for  keeping  alive  so  many  poets 
and  cursed  it  again  for  starving  so  many  of  them; 
wanted  to  know  how  a  man  could  behold  the 
horses  of  the  chariot  of  the  sun  if  he  had  to  grub 
for  a  living,  and  wanted  to  drive  most  poets  back 
to  grubbing  for  a  living  as  soon  as  he  observed 
their  manner  of  beholding  the  horses  of  the 
chariot  of  the  sun;  said  you  ought  to  fatten  poets 
to  make  them  sing,  and  became  violently  angry 
the  moment  a  fat  poet  began  singing;  blamed  a 
rich  man  for  feeding  a  pet  lion  instead  of  sub- 


1 1 8J    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

sidizing  some  author  at  much  less  expense,  and 
was  all  for  feeding  the  author  to  the  lion  on  read 
ing  What  he  wrote.  He  wanted  authors  protected, 
but  the  literary  choices  made  by  the  protector 
almost  drove  him  mad.  Juvenal,  of  course,  was 
wholly  unreasonable,  but  his  state  of  mind  cor 
responded  quite  exactly  to  the  confusion  of  the 
case,  and  the  confusion  is  still  with  us.  He  had 
no  solution  but  the  lame  one  that  Caesar  should 
select  and  subsidize  the  author,  and  he  had  al 
ready  completely  damned  the  average  Caesar. 
But  Caesar  certainly  seemed  to  be  just  as  good 
a  solution  as  any  of  those  modern  monsters  with 
five  respectable  pairs  of  legs  under  a  round  table; 
those  headless  decapods  that  we  call  upon  nowa 
days  as  committees  to  do  our  dubious  jobs. 


INCORPORATED  TASTE 

When  college  commencement  coma  or  old- 
alumni-sleeping-sickness  stole  over  the  senses  at 
a  meeting  of  the  American  Corporation  of  Let 
ters  not  long  ago,  the  audience  had  no  just  grounds 
for  complaint. 

No  one  of  course  had  a  right  to  expect  that  a 
meeting  of  so  respectable  a  body  would  be  either 
inflammatory  or  gay,  and  it  may  seem  invidious 
to  commemorate  it  here  as  an  occasion  of  more 
than  usual  dullness.  Yet  the  pulse  and  temper 
ature  of  that  dignified  public  body  did  seem  a 
little  subnormal,  even  from  the  standard  of  digni 
fied  bodies  generally.  How  could  that  charming 
and  impulsive  writer  so  subdue  the  seductions  of 
his  own  mind  as  to  sink  for  the  time  being  into 
an  utter  presiding  officer  ?  Why  need  that  learned 
professor  have  read  a  literary  paper  prepared 
presumably  by  a  member  of  the  Sophomore  class? 
And  how  could  that  busy  public  official  contrive 
to  give  so  strong  an  impression  that  nothing,  abso 
lutely  nothing,  was  going  on  inside  him? 

Grant  the  necessity  of  every  unimpeachable 
sentiment  and  every  platitude.  Allow  for  that 

119 


120    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

American  platform  change  whereby  an  individual, 
clearly  distinguishable  in  private  life  from  the 
social  scenery  around  him,  melts,  spreads  out, 
is  personally  obliterated,  coalesces  with  the  homo 
geneous  mass  of  leading  citizens,  irreproachable, 
featureless,  placid,  fluent,  explanatory,  and  null. 
Still  there  are  those  who  whisper  that  no  man 
could  so  completely  and  for  so  long  a  time  con 
ceal  his  intellect,  if  he  had  one;  that  an  active 
mind  would  surely  at  some  moment  kick  the  cover 
ing  off.  Decorum  carried  to  a  certain  point  breeds 
horrid  passions  in  the  human  breast  and  the  gen 
tlest  platitude  pushed  too  far  may  drive  men  in 
the  desperation  of  their  ennui  to  deeds  of  inhum 
anity.  That  is  a  peril  against  which  dignified  civic 
and  academic  bodies  would  do  well  to  guard  on 
such  occasons.  These  scenes  of  excessive  public 
calm  might  breed  a  violence  that  would  blow  a 
perfectly  innocent,  middle-aged  gentleman  clean 
out  of  the  wages  of  Who's  Who? 
That  was  the  danger  as  I  saw  it  and  the  only 
danger.  Yet  that  was  not  at  all  the  point  of  view 
from  which  the  critics  blamed  it.  This  very  meet 
ing  called  forth  strange  rebukes.  Some  said  it 
was  fastidious,  undemocratic;  others  that  it  made 
vile  concessions  to  the  public  taste.  There  was  no 
coherence  in  their  remarks  upon  it  but  there  was 
as  usual  an  undercurrent  of  dislike.  Whenever 
the  annual  meeting  of  the  Corporation  of  Letters 


INCORPORATED  TASTE  1 2 1 

comes  around  there  is  always  an  ardent  hope  that 
it  will  misbehave.  The  comment  of  clever  out 
siders  is  usually  ironical.  One  is  supposed  to  be 
amused  every  year  when  someone  else  refers  to 
its  members  as  "immortals,"  and  if  one  can  not 
annually  make  the  same  remark  about  people  who 
take  themselves  too  seriously,  one  must  at  least 
seem  to  take  pleasure  in  hearing  it.  People  proud 
of  their  sense  of  humor  insist  in  precisely  the 
same  words  each  year  that  there  is  something 
funny  about  it,  and  if  there  is  any  falling  off  in 
the  vivacity  of  your  annual  assent,  they  snub  you. 

Newspaper  reporters  attend  each  meeting  of 
the  Corporation  of  Letters  in  the  hope  that  this 
time  the  members  will  appear  in  togas  with  bay 
leaves  in  their  hair,  or  at  least  in  court  dress 
carrying  swords.  And  although  nothing  of  a 
broadly  comic  nature  has  ever  occurred,  the  out 
ward  effect  of  this  infant,  and,  to  my  mind,  in 
nocent  institution,  is  still  to  set  people  to  winking 
at  one  another  once  a  year,  without  a  word  of 
explanation  as  to  why  they  wink. 

To  be  sure,  you  do  hear  comments  from  time  to 
time  on  the  taste  shown  by  the  Corporation  in  the 
selection  of  its  members,  but  they  are  not  es 
pecially  significant.  People  are  too  familiar  with 
the  casualties  of  club  membership  to  think  that 
any  group  of  men  can  add  to  their  number  reason 
ably.  Strange  creatures  sift  into  any  club.  The 


1 2 2     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

best  of  committees  on  admissions  can  no  more  ex 
clude  them  altogether  than  the  best  of  housekeep 
ers  can  exclude  house  flies.  There  is  always  a 
certain  number  of  club  members  who  have  bred 
from  eggs  laid  in  the  walls  or  under  the  carpets; 
it  is  impossible  that  any  one  should  have  let  them 
in  on  purpose. 

Principles,  standards,  and  the  intelligence  of  the 
persons  who  make  the  choice,  are  no  safeguards 
in  this  perilous  domain.  Had  the  nine  muses  been 
obliged,  in  committee,  to  nominate  a  tenth,  luck 
would  have  had  it  that  she  should  turn  out  an 
idiot.  No  reasonable  person  can  blame  the  Cor 
poration  for  a  certain  proportion  of  mishaps  in 
membership. 

As  to  the  true  source  of  this  undercurrent  of 
hostility,  I  can  only  make  a  guess.  I  should  say 
that  it  springs  from  the  feeling  that  the  Corpora 
tion  is  itself  a  mistake,  rather  than  that  it  some 
times  makes  one.  The  critics  seem  to  think  that 
any  such  institution  in  an  English-speaking  com 
munity  would  be  likely  to  be  made  up  of  merely 
leading  citizens,  and  they  feel  that  from  the  point 
of  view  of  everything  essential  to  letters  leading 
citizens  are  as  a  rule  injurious.  They  believe  it 
would  always  encourage  what  is  respectable  and 
never  by  any  chance  encourage  what  is  more  than 
respectable,  and  that  respectability  in  letters  is  too 
much  encouraged  as  it  is.  They  think  that  when 


INCORPORATED  TASTE  123 

art  or  literature  achieves  anything  permanently 
desirable  it  is  something  that  no  committee  of  suc 
cessful  American  citizens  would  have  antecedently 
recommended  or  would  be  likely  to  discover  after 
wards  inside  of  two  generations  from  the  date  of 
its  occurrence.  To  the  chaos  of  public  taste  they 
believe  it  contributes  only  an  element  of  pomposity 
leaving  the  chaos  just  where  it  was.  In  short,  they 
loathe  institutionalism  in  taste,  having  a  horror 
not  of  standards,  but  of  any  corporation  that 
would  tell  them  what  they  are. 

I  may  not  do  justice  to  this  point  of  view  be 
cause  it  is  not  one  with  which  I  sympathize,  but 
I  should  imagine  that  the  argument  of  its  uphold 
ers  would  run  about  like  this :  There  are  two 
classes  of  literary  and  artistic  workers :  the  trans- 
muters  and  the  transmitters.  The  transmuters 
are  those  whose  minds  leave  an  impression  on 
what  passes  through  them.  They  survive  by  a 
force  that  is  elemental  and  beyond  analysis,  and 
often  unpleasant  to  the  most  eminent  of  their  con 
temporaries.  They  could  no  more  be  a  poet 
laureate  than  could  Shelley.  They  could  no  more 
get  into  an  academy  than  could  Flaubert.  By 
eminent,  shining,  contemporary  civic  bodies  they 
are  usually  left  aside.  An  academy  is  an  institu 
tion  for  honoring  the  people  who  could  get  along 
without  it.  An  academy  is  always  rich  in  members 
of  the  other  type ;  that  is  to  say,  the  transmitters. 


124    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

These  are  the  men  who  leave  all  things,  both  in 
art  and  in  literature,  precisely  where  they  find 
them.  They  are  of  immediate  social  value  for 
purposes  of  repetition.  They  are  the  active,  in 
dustrious,  socially  blameless  individuals,  who  write 
most  of  the  books  that  are  sold,  hold  most  of 
the  good  positions,  are  the  soonest  known,  and 
the  soonest  forgotten,  being  wholly  of  the  sub 
stance  of  tfieir  hour  and  their  place,  and  the  ma 
jority  in  every  institution. 

In  society  these  people  may  be  useful  as  a  bal 
last;  in  art  they  are  always  a  dead  weight.  Band 
them  together  and  you  add  one  more  to  the  al 
ready  too  large  number  of  organizations  for  the 
suppression  of  human  diversity.  Suppose,  they 
say,  an  academy  had  existed  at  the  middle  of  the 
last  century.  By  the  time  Longfellow  was  receiv 
ing  more  encouragement  than  he  deserved  it  would 
have  encouraged  him  still  more.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  would  have  discouraged  Poe  either  nega 
tively  or  positively.  Very  likely  there  would  have 
been  a  fine  row  with  Poe,  and  another  sore  spot 
carried  to  the  grave  by  that  unhappy  mortal. 
Take  it  all  in  all,  an  academy  organized  for  the 
deliberate  purpose  of  discouraging  all  that  a  ma 
jority  of  its  members  most  approved  in  con 
temporary  literature  would  probably  work  out  just 
as  well  as,  or  better  than,  the  other  kind.  A 
learned  body  actuated  by  malevolence  towards 


INCORPORATED  TASTE  125 

literature  has  never  been  tried.     Perhaps  it  might 
accomplish  something. 

All  of  which  seems  rather  high-flown  and  in 
consistent  with  the  probable  attitude  of  these 
critics  in  their  daily  lives.  They  are  probably 
themselves  members  of  some  humdrum  institution 
and  are  not  worried  lest  it  crush  out  brilliant 
eccentricity.  Such  a  body  has  to  do  with  letters, 
not  as  a  divine  calling,  but  as  a  profession  wherein 
men  earn  their  bread.  It  has  to  do  with  levels, 
and  is  not  to  blame  for  guessing  wrong  on  peaks. 
People  do  not  blame  a  university  for  withholding 
the  degree  of  bachelor  of  arts  from  anybody  but 
a  prophet.  University  decisions  are  as  a  rule 
stupid,  and  universities  muddle  along  on  the  whole 
usefully.  A  group  of  authors  is  of  course  a  de 
pressing  sight,  authors  being  too  much  alike  as  it 
is,  but  a  grouping  of  authors  is  no  more  likely  to 
snuff  out  a  genius  than  a  genius  is  to  snuff  out  the 
group.  It  is  moreover  so  analogous  to  other  com 
binations  that  if  a  man  set  out  to  attack  it,  he 
would  be  involved  in  too  vast  a  crusade.  If  one 
obeyed  an  impulse  altogether  artistic,  one  would 
go  up  and  down  the  land  pillaging. 


BARBARIANS  AND  THE  CRITIC 

As  I  remember  it,  at  the  Athenian  Club  that 
evening  there  had  been  a  meeting  of  our  Com 
mittee  on  House  Management  in  which  the  ques 
tion  of  buying  awnings  for  the  north  windows 
was  debated  from  nine  o'clock  till  half-past  ten, 
when  it  was  unanimously  referred  to  a  sub-com 
mittee  without  power  consisting  of  the  chairman, 
the  treasurer  and  the  secretary,  who  were  to  make 
recommendations  at  the  next  meeting. 

Then  came  supper  and  after  that  Mr.  Harbing- 
ton  Dish  read  a  paper  on  American  verse  reform 
in  which,  while  deprecating  the  radical  views  of 
certain  writers,  he  insisted  fhat  the  situation  was 
very  serious  and  that  something  ought  to  be  done. 
I  recall  only  two  of  his  suggestions:  First,  that 
rhymes  if  retained  at  all  in  the  new  era  that  was 
now  upon  us  should  always  be  at  the  beginning 
and  never  at  the  end  of  the  line ;  and,  second,  that 
the  verse  form  once  popular  under  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  Heptarchy  ought  to  be  revived.  There  was 
much  applause,  but  after  it  the  meeting  broke  up 
rather  suddenly,  the  members  slipping  away  so 
quietly  that  Jarman  and  I  who  were  seated  in  the 

126 


BARBARIANS  AND  THE  CRITICS     127 

two  big  armchairs  by  the  fire  did  not  realize  at 
first  that  we  were  alone. 

"It's  the  worst  thing  he  ever  wrote,"  Jarman 
was  saying  about  a  writer  of  our  acquaintance, 
"and  it's  by  all  odds  the  most  successful — and  not 
merely  in  sales,  either.  You  should  see  his  letters, 
from  people  really  distinguished,  people  you'd 
never  suppose  would  be  taken  in  by  it.  And  all 
that  talk  about  his  vision,  keen  social  criticism, 
sense  of  the  underlying  forces  of  modern  life, 
breadth,  depth,  audacity!  Why  the  whole  thing's 
nothing  but  a  compilation  of  the  ideas  in  the  air, 
without  a  single  individual,  distinctive, " 

Jarman's  feet  were  on  the  fender,  precisely  in 
my  line  of  vision  and  I  remember  noticing  that  he 
wore  tan  shoes.  I  closed  my  eyes  for  a  few  mom 
ents  and  when  I  opened  them  again  the  shoes  had 
changed  to  a  kind  of  bath-slippers  and  as  I  glanced 
up  I  saw  he  was  now  clothed  in  a  thin,  white, 
sleeveless  garment  of  strange  cut. 

"Why  Jarman,  what  in  the  world "  said  I. 

"Mr.  Jarman  went  out  ten  minutes  ago,"  said 
the  person  in  white,  in  a  low-pitched  voice,  and 
at  the  same  time  bent  forward,  revealing  a 
swarthy  wrinkled  face,  with  prominent  curved 
nose,  and  dark  eyes  of  extraordinary  brilliance — 
a  man  over  sixty-five,  I  should  say,  lean  but  vigor 
ous. 

"May  I  ask  to  whom  I  have  the  pleasure" — 


1 2&    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

said  I,  edging  my  chair  to  a  point  from  which  I 
could  reach  the  fire-tongs  if  necessary. 

"The  man  of  Aquinum,"  he  said  "the  Aquinas, 
not  that  upstart  Christian  dog,  Thomas,  I  believe 
you  call  him.  W'hat  right  has  that  corruptor  of 
my  own  tongue  to  the  name  of  my  own  birthplace 
when  my  claim  is  prior  to  his  by  eleven  centuries? 
But  that's  the  justice  of  you  barbarians  to  an 
honest  man  of  letters.  Who  was  the  Aquinas  for 
a  thousand  years  before  the  jargon  of  the  tiresome 
Thomas  was  ever  read  by  anybody,  I'd  like  to 
know.  Just  answer  me  that." 

"I  am  not  acquainted  in  Aquinum,"  I  said,  "and 
I  am  sorry  to  say  I  know  nothing  about  the 
Aquinas  family,  but  perhaps  if  you  mention  your 
entire  name " 

"Oh,  well,"  said  he,  "if  your  modern  thoughts 
can  travel  back  any  further  than  last  week 
Wednesday,  perhaps  you  will  recall  one  D.  Junius 
Juvenalis." 

"Juvenal?"  said  I.  "Why,  yes;  it  was  you, 
wasn't  it,  who  said  children  should  be  treated 
with  the  greatest  reverence  and  then  wrote  a  lot 
of  things  that  had  to  be  cut  out  of  every  edition 
that  was  likely  to  fall  into  the  hands  of  young 
people.  Oh,  and  let  me  see,  there  was  Dr.  John 
son's  poem  London  and  the  one  on  Vanity,  and 
"Slow  rises  worth  by  poverty  oppressed"  and  that 
sort  of  thing.  You're  in  the  dictionaries  of 


BARBARIANS  AND  THE  CRITICS     129 

familiar  quotations — nearly  half  a  page.  I  always 
get  you  mixed  up  with  Oliver  Goldsmith,  I  don't 
know  why;  but  I  believe  people  generally  do  get 
you  mixed  up  with  somebody  else.  If  you  will 
pardon  my  saying  so,  I  think  the  prevailing  im 
pression  of  you  at  present  is  rather  indistinct, 
and  still  fading  perhaps,  especially  here — the  war, 
you  know,  and  electricity,  aviation,  submarines, 
motion  pictures,  breathless  progress  of  the  social 
sciences,  new  education,  new  woman,  new  poetry, 
the  referendum  and  recall,  world  federation, 
eugenics,  the  rights  of  labor,  and  the  democratic 
push.  It  seems  rather  an  unfortunate  time  to 
choose  for  spending  your — your  outing,  if  I  may 
call  it  that.  I  should  have  supposed  that  Oxford 
in  1760,  say,  would  have  been  about  the  latest 
occasion.  In  short  you  will  find  us,  I  fear,  a 

little  distrait,  forgetful " 

"Be  quiet  for  a  little  while,  barbarian,  and  I 
will  try  to  explain.  It  is  precisely  because  I  am  not 
forgotten  that  I  am  here.  My  name,  of  course,  is 
seldom  mentioned  and  I  have  not  heard  for  fifty 
years  a  correct  quotation  of  any  of  my  words, 
but  my  thoughts  go  on  among  you.  They  go  on 
damnably.  It  is  not  for  the  pleasure  of  meeting 
them  that  I  am  come.  Quite  the  contrary.  I  am 
sent  back  here  in  punishment  like  other  poets  that 
have  sinned.  Race  hatred  was  my  undoing.  I 
called  it  my  Roman  patriotism,  and  I  cursed  those 


i3Q    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

absurd  Hebrews  and  the  'esurient  Greekling'  and 
those  outlandish  Egyptians  and  sneered  at  the 
Gauls  and  railed  at  all  those  ill-bred  Eastern  fel 
lows  that  overran  the  town,  and  I  felt  quite  virtu 
ous  in  doing  so.  And  for  helping  to  perpetuate 
the  great  race  lie  and  the  geographical  inhumani 
ties  which  are  still  your  curse,  I  am  damned  to 
revisit  my  own  thoughts  as  they  float  about  in  the 
world  through  the  ages,  the  same  old  thoughts, 
dressed  up  in  barbarous  foolish  phrases,  passed 
from  one  silly  mouth  to  another,  turned  into  tink^ 
ling  rhymes  by  the  worst  series  of  imitators  that 
ever  a  man  had — 

Let  observation  with   extensive  view 
Survey  mankind  from  China  to  Peru. 

Great  poetry,  that !  That  man  Johnson  had  no 
word-sense.  I  never  said  anything  of  the  sort. 
What  I  said  was 

Omnibus  in  terris  quae  sunt  a  Gadibus — " 

"Wait  a  minute,"  said  I,  "I  don't  quite — " 
"Well,  what  I  said  didn't  sound  in  the  least  like 
his  pedantic,  mincing,  repetitious  stuff,  or  Dry- 
den's  either  for  that  matter,  or  Chapman's  or  that 
series  of  Oxford  dons.  Why  can't  they  let  me 
alone?  That's  the  curse  of  my  thoughts.  They 
are  never  forgotten.  Not  a  day  passes  without 
some  one's  spinning  them  out  in  a  literary  essay 


BARBARIANS  AND  THE  CRITICS     131 

for  a  magazine  all  about  the  discerning  few  and 
the  undiscerning  rabble  or  in  tedious  conversation 
at  some  club,  like  yours.  Take,  for  instance,  the 
talk  of  your  critical  friend,  Jarmanus,  what's  his 
name,  about  the  mean  rewards  of  merit  and  the 
triumph  of  mediocrity.  You'll  find  the  whole  of 
it  in  Sat.  VII,  line  9  to  99 — 

Qui  nihil  expositum   soleat  deducere,   nee   qui 
Communi  feriat — " 

"Yes,  yes,"  I  interrupted,  "but  please  don't  talk 
Yiddish  or  whatever  it  is.  I  am  a  modern  New 
York  man  and  I  agree  with  our  most  progressive 
educators  that  any  classic  sentiment  which  cannot 
be  adequately  expressed  in  the  English  language 
is  not  worth  reading.  You  were  saying?'* 

"I  was  merely  repeating  something  I  said  about 
the  best  selling  fiction  of  my  day.  I  thought  I 
had  put  it  rather  better  and  more  compactly  than 
your  Mr.  Jarman  did  or  that  man  in  the  Atlantic 
Monthly  a  while  ago  who  spread  four  sentences 
of  mine  over  eight  pages,  or  any  of  the  fifteen 
others  within  the  last  six  months.  Is  there  ever 
a  moment  when  commercialism  is  not  being 
lamented  by  your  cultured  critic  of  the  day,  who 
in  a  literary  sense  is  no  wise  distinguishable  from 
your  cultured  critic  of  the  day  before?  Writing 
on  this  theme,  they  are  as  like  as  the  white  sow's 
litter,  and  I  have  to  read  them  all.  By  the  Great 
Girl's  bow  and  quiver,  by  the  salsipotent  fork,  by 


132     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

the  javelin  of  the  Wise  Lady,  by  the  Cirrhaean 
spikes,  by  the  boiled  head  of  my  own  baby  served 
in  Egyptian  vinegar,  I  curse  the  whole  insanable 
cacoethical  cohort  of  scriptitating " 

"Hold  on!     What — what's  the  matter?" 

"I  was  just  thinking  that  I  should  have  to  read 
in  the  next  number  of  the  Edinburgh  Review  or 
the  Nineteenth  Century  the  self-same  things,  only 
ill  expressed,  that  I  said  to  Umbricius  at  the 
Capene  arch  that  evening  in  the  summer,  I  think, 
of  1 20,  when  he  was  moving  his  furniture  out  of 
town.  Queer  that  I  who  wrote  Occidit  miseros 
crambe  repetita " 

"There  you  go  again." 

"I  say  it's  queer  that  I  of  all  people  should  be 
condemned  throughout  all  time  to  stuff  myself 
with  the  warmed-over  cabbage  of  my  own  com 
monplace.  I  didn't  mind  coming  back  for  Shake 
speare  when  he  stole  that  thing  about  'Imperial 
Caesar,  dead  and  turned  to  clay/  but  I  haven't 
had  an  afternoon  in  Hades  since  Matthew  Arnold 
wrote  about  Philistines,  and  nowadays  with  every 
dull  person  writing  about  the  money-god  there  is 
no  rest.  Why,  once  when  I  'hoped  to  pass  the 
week-end  in  Hell  I  was  called  back  to  read  Mr. 
Upton  Sinclair  on  the  sin  of  paying  a  thousand 
dollars  for  a  toothbrush — a  matter  which  I  had 
settled  finally  in  Sed  plures  nimia  congesta " 

"Please  don't  do  that." 


BARBARIANS  AND  THE  CRITICS     133 

"And  what  with  the  constant  reappearance  of 
my  ideas  on  mothers-in-law,  the  newly  rich,  suc 
cess,  waste,  s'how,  luxury,  gambling,  graft,  the 
social  climber,  divorce,  woman  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  anti-suffragist,  woman  as  the  target 
for  brightly  cynical  remarks,  alcoholism,  prosti 
tution,  country  life,  subsidization  of  authors,  high 
cost  of  living  and  forty  other  burning  modern 
questions,  it  looks  as  if  I  should  never — .  And 
the  hideous  uniformity  of  your  vapid  writers  in 
their  common  delineation  of  our  thoughts;  the 
large  wastes  of  identical  language.  Forty  novels 
in  a  row  with  the  thoughts  all  dating  from  the 
reign  of  Domitian  and  all  expressed  alike.  Belles- 
lettres  produced  by  machinery.  But  though  the 
monotony  of  the  modern  manner  is  terrible,  that 
is  not  the  worst  of  it.  What  I  can't  stand  is  the 
stench — " 

"Stench?"    I  asked. 

"Smell  of  decaying  reputations.  Nothing  worse 
to  a  fairly  immortal  nose  than  the  smell  of  a  pass 
ing  modern  reputation.  Impossible  to  stay  within 
a  mile  of  your  national  capital,  and  the  literary 
people  are  almost  as  bad.  I  tried  to  drop  in  on 
a  group  of  Imagist  poets  on  my  way  here  just 
now,  but  I  nearly  fainted." 

"I  hope,"  said  I,  drawing  my  chair  away,  "7 
haven't  been  too — " 

"Oh,  no,  not  you.    That's  why  I  chose  you  in- 


134     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

stead  of  a  celebrity.     People  without  any  reputa 
tion  to  decay  are  comparatively  odorless." 

At  that  moment  the  room  turned  upside  down 
and  spilled  him  out  of  it  and  I  was  tossing  about 
in  space  till  I  heard  Jarman  say,  "I've  been  shak 
ing  you  for  fully  five  minutes.  If  you  want  to 
catch  the  1 132,  you'll  have  to  hurry." 


REVIEWER'S   CRAMP 

One  would  think  that  the  most  dogged  of  fire 
side  defenders  would  be  satisfied  with  the  moral 
purport  of  a  novel  that  I  read  some  years  ago. 
Nearly  all  the  characters  in  it  who  offend  against 
the  marriage  bond — and  there  are  quite  a  lot  of 
them — come  to  a  bad  end.  In  fact,  in  the  interest 
of  literary  variety  it  would  seem  that  sudden 
death,  delirium,  blasted  hopes,  social  perdition, 
and  the  wages  of  sin  in  one  form  or  another  were 
distributed  with  an  almost  too  perfect  moral  pre 
cision.  From  the  birth  of  the  first  illegitimate 
infant  in  an  early  chapter  down  to  the  moment 
in  the  final  pages  when  the  last  illicit  lover  has 
his  skull  crushed  in,  the  mills  of  God  are  made 
to  grind  in  a  manner  that  ought  seriously  to  dis 
courage  the  carnally  minded.  Yet  instantly  there 
were  many  commentators  who  denounced  the  book 
as  dis'solute. 

One  of  them  said  he  was  shocked  by  the  "de 
liberate  devotion  of  such  a  pen  as  the  author's  to 
the  defiance  of  the  social  conventions  and  ideas 
of  duty  and  morality."  Another  wanted  to  know 
how  "parents  and  guardians  can  prevent  young 
people  from  reading  such  horrid  low  class  tales." 

135 


THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

They  called  it  "dangerous"  and  "depraved." 
They  said  that  the  author  had  set  out  malevolently 
to  "undermine  all  respect  for  marriage  and  par 
enthood." 

Why  reviewers  pick  out  certain  books  as  dang 
erous  is  one  of  the  mysteries  of  literary  journalism. 
You  can  no  more  tell  what  will  frighten  reviewers 
than  what  a  horse  will  shy  at.  A  reviewer  will 
pass  the  same  familiar  object  twenty  times  and 
then  of  a  sudden  rear  at  the  sight  of  it  as  in  the 
presence  of  a  monster  never  before  beheld.  If 
one  could  gather  all  the  books  and  plays  de 
nounced  as  dangerous  in  the  last  twenty  years, 
what  a  splendid  object  lesson  it  would  be  in  the 
inutility  of  moral  apprehension.  Even  so  sensitive 
a  moral  being  as  a  New  York  City  politician  prob 
ably  would  not  seek  to  suppress  to-day  another 
"Mrs.  Warren's  Profession." 

Reviewers  are  of  course  aware  of  this  when 
they  stop  to  think  of  it.  Every  reviewer  really 
knew  that  all  the  ideas,  situations,  and  emotions 
presented  in  that  novel  had  been  thumbed  and 
dog-eared  in  nearly  every  circulating  library  for 
a  generation.  For  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  was 
about  the  most  conventional  book  that  the  author 
had  ever  written  and  it  seemed  almost  a  compila 
tion  from  the  fiction  of  our  time.  The  homes 
that  it  could  undermine  must  all  have  been  long 
since  blasted. 


REVIEWER'S  CRAMP  137 

Perhaps  it  is  due  to  temporary  loss  of  memory, 
whereby  one  modern  novel  suddenly  looms  up  to 
the  reviewer's  mind,  alone  and  terrible,  devoid  of 
relation  to  any  other  modern  novel  in  the  world. 
Perhaps  if  you  had  forgotten  completely  what  a 
modern  novelist  was  like,  the  sight  of  one  would 
be  shocking.  Even  Mr.  Harold  McChamber 
might  seem  peculiar  if  encountered  by  a  mind  en 
tirely  blank.  Or  it  may  be  that  certain  reviewers 
are  constrained  at  intervals  to  utter  moral  noises 
without  regard  to  the  occasion,  just  as  a  watch 
dog  will  sometimes  bark  at  a  wheelbarrow,  not 
because  there  is  danger  in  the  wheel-barrow,  but 
because  there  is  bark  in  the  dog.  Perhaps  the  re 
viewers  above  quoted  could  not  have  held  in  at 
that  moment  no  matter  what  novelist  had  passed 
by  and  it  happened  to  be  this  one.  Neither  he  nor 
they  were  really  to  blame  for  it.  They  fidgetted 
merely  because  they  felt  fidgety  and  long  months 
followed  in  which,  with  Arnold  Bennett  up  to 
something  passionate,  H.  G.  Wells  at  his  wicked 
est,  Bernard  S'haw  in  eruption,  new  bad  words 
coming  out  in  each  installment  of  the  Oxford 
Dictionary,  and  the  air  thick  with  volumes  of  the 
most  terribly  lucid  sexual  explanations,  they  faced 
equally  grave  moral  perils  with  entire  composure. 
Then  just  as  you  were  dozing  off  over  some  quite 
ordinary  bedside  compound  of  matrimonial  mis 
calculations  and  rebellious  hearts,  they  would  ring 


1381    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

out  the  wild  alarm  again — seized  by  the  same  old 
unaccountable  spasm  over  the  duality  of  the  two 
sexes,  and  the  usualness  of  the  usual  novel,  and 
and  the  contemporaneousness  of  their  contempo 
raries. 

I  believe,  however,  I  can  offer  a  better  explana 
tion  based  on  my  personal  experience  as  a  re 
viewer.  Such  seizures  as  the  one  above  men 
tioned  and  they  often  take  widely  different  forms, 
are  the  result,  I  think,  of  reviewer's  cramp. 

At  all  events  I  myself,  after  reviewing  books 
for  five  years,  was  obliged  to  desist  on  account 
of  reviewer's  cramp.  I  may  say  for  the  enlight 
enment  of  those  who  are  not  familiar  with  the 
malady  that  it  is  purely  mental,  having  none  of 
the  physical  symptoms  of  the  nervous  affection 
which  sometimes  jerks  a  writer's  pen-hand  in 
the  air.  My  hand  was  not  jerked  in  the  air, 
but  my  mind  was,  and  from  that  time  to  this 
I  have  never  started  to  write  a  review  that  my 
mind  did  not  immediately  fly  away  from  it  and 
rivet  itself  on  something  else ;  and  when  detached 
with  difficulty  from  that  particular  object  it  would 
rivet  itself  on  another,  equally  remote  from  the  re 
view.  It  is  no  mere  lack  of  interest  in  writing  a 
review,  for  that  might  be  overcome— is  overcome 
daily  and  hourly — and  besides  you  see  reviews 
being  written  everywhere  by  people  who  obviously 
could  have  had  no  interest  in  writing  them.  It 


REVIEWER'S  CRAMP  139 

is  the  passionate  interest  in  something  else  that 
constitutes  the  gravity  of  my  case — the  more  so 
because  the  things  that  then  awaken  it  do  not 
normally  attract  me.  I  have  been  enchanted  for 
a  long  time  by  an  ordinary  penwiper  from  the 
moment  of  starting  to  write  a  review.  When  a 
bee  has  entered  the  room,  although  I  am  not  in 
the  least  entomological  in  my  inclinations,  I  have 
become  a  Fabre. 

Recently  I  gave  the  thing  one  more  trial,  think 
ing  that  after  a  long  interval  the  condition  might 
have  passed.  I  took  five  novels  that  had  enter 
tained  me  and  determined  to  stir  them  all  together 
in  four  or  five  pleasant  pages  round  the  central 
notion  that,  after  all,  each  showed  in  one  way  or 
another  the  tendency  of  the  contemporary  novel 
to  be  contemporary,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  from 
the  pages  of  one  you  would  not  know  that  the  war 
had  existed  and  from  the  pages  of  another  you 
would  see  plainly  that  but  for  the  war  the  book 
would  not  exist.  I  should  express  surprise  at  a 
writer  who  showed  no  traces  of  the  war,  but  I 
should  admit  that  he  was  nevertheless  contempo 
rary.  I  read  dozens  of  those  articles  every  month; 
I  like  them;  and  I  started  to  make  one.  This 
time  it  was  sealing-wax.  I  rolled  six  balls  of 
sealing-wax,  making  them  rounder  and  rounder. 
It  is  wonderful  how  round  you  can  make  balls  of 
sealing-wax,  if  you  give  your  whole  soul  to  it. 


140     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

Most  reviewers  sooner  or  later  have  some 
form  of  reviewer's  cramp,  but  the  victim  of  my 
form  of  it  is  not  only  permanently  disabled;  he 
is  under  the  illusion  of  righteousness.  He  be 
lieves  he  is  justified  in  behaving  in  that  way.  Not 
only  that,  but  he  believes  other  reviewers  ought 
to  behave  as  he  does.  I  felt  nobler  after  rolling 
those  wax  balls  than  I  should  have  felt  after  writ 
ing  the  review,  and  so  far  as  I  have  read  the  re 
views  of  those  novels,  I  believe  almost  every 
writer  if  he  had  applied  himself  to  sealing-wax 
instead  would  be  feeling  nobler  too.  For  I  can 
not  believe  that  they  meant  a  word  they  said  or 
that  they  wanted  to  say  it — I  mean  in  regard  to 
the  quality  of  the  books,  not  of  course  their  mere 
outlines  of  the  stories. 

I  cannot  believe,  for  example,  that  a  man  per 
haps  fifty  years  of  age  and  a  reviewer  of  novels 
by  the  hundred  can  become  ecstatic  often.  I  be 
lieve  he  will  go  a  whole  year  at  his  occupation 
without  being  ecstatic  once.  I  do  not  believe  that 
after  reading  Miss  Fanny  Wilson's  Apple  Blos 
soms,  he  meant  any  one  of  the  following  words: 
"From  her  seasoned  but  joyous  throat  the  old 
melody  ripples  forth  fresh  and  free,  full  of 
delicious  whims  and  sly  laughter,  reminiscent  of 
the  Vie  de  Boheme."  I  insist  also  that  those  five 
reviewers,  each  of  whom  implied  that  on  reading 
the  The  Torment  he  was  shaken  like  a  reed  by  the 


REVIEWER'S  CRAMP  141 

wind  knew  perfectly  well  either  that  he  was  not 
shaking  at  all  or  that  he  was  making  himself 
shake. 

Nothing  stood  out  from  the  general  situation 
as  they  implied  that  it  did  in  all  of  these  reviews. 
In  short,  these  reviewers  were  subdued  to  the  iron 
law  of  reviewing,  and  this  iron  law  ordiains  that 
reviewing  shall  be  the  perpetual  announcement  of 
differences  that  are  not  perceived  and  of  astonish 
ments  for  good  or  for  evil  that  are  not  experi 
enced,  and  that  it  shall  be  accompanied  by  a  con 
strained  silence  as  to  the  sense  of  monotony  that 
undoubtedly  always  pervades  the  reviewer's 
bosom.  There  is  stiff  compulsion  in  it.  Such 
things  could  not  happen  in  a  free  and  private  life. 

If,  for  example,  a  man  in  private  life  had  for 
one  day  a  puree  of  beans,  and  the  next  day  hari 
cots  verts,  and  then  in  daily  succession  bean  soup, 
bean  salad,  butter  beans,  lima,  black,  navy,  Bos 
ton  baked,  and  kidney  beans,  and  then  back  to 
puree  and  all  over  again,  he  would  not  be  in  the 
relation  of  the  general  eater  to  food  or  in  the 
relation  of  the  general  reader  to  books.  But  he 
would  be  in  the  relation  of  the  general  reviewer 
toward  novels.  He  would  soon  perceive  that  the 
relation  was  neither  normal  nor  desirable,  and  he 
would  take  measures,  violent  if  need  be,  to  change 
it.  He  would  not  say  of  the  haricots  verts  when 
they  came  round  again  that  they  were  quite  in 


i42i    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

the  vein  of  the  Fie  de  Boheme  but  ever  fresh  and 
free,  and  he  would  not  say  on  his  navy  bean  day 
that  they  were  as  brisk  and  stirring  little  beans  of 
the  sea  as  he  could  recall  in  his  recent  eating.  He 
would  say  grimly,  Beans  again,  and  he  would  take 
prompt  steps  to  intermit  this  abominable  preces 
sion  of  bean  dishes,  however  diversely  they  were 
contrived. 

If  change  for  any  reason  were  impossible — if 
owing  to  a  tyrant  wife  and  the  presence  of  a 
monomaniac  in  the  kitchen  we  could  imagine  him 
constrained  to  an  indefinite  continuance, — then  he 
would  either  conceive  a  personal  hatred  toward 
all  beans  that  would  make  him  unjust  to  any  bean 
however  meritorious,  or  he  would  acquire  a  mad 
indiscriminateness  of  acquiescence  and  any  bean 
might  please.  And  his  judgment  would  be  in 
either  case  an  unsafe  guide  for  general  eaters. 

This  I  believe  is  what  happens  to  almost  all 
reviewers  of  fiction  after  a  certain  time,  and  it 
accounts  satisfactorily  for  various  phenomena 
that  are  often  attributed  to  a  baser  cause.  It  is 
the  custom  at  certain  intervals  to  denounce  review 
ers  for  their  motives.  They  are  called  venal  and 
they  are  called  cowardly  by  turns.  They  are 
blamed  for  having  low  standards  or  no  standards 
at  all  and  for  not  having  the  slightest  sense  of 
anything  of  a  permanent  value  in  literature,  and 
for  using  the  language  of  the  advertising  page. 


REVIEWER'S  CRAMP  143 

I  think  their  defects  are  due  chiefly  to  the  nature 
of  their  calling;  that  they  suffer  from  an  occupa 
tional  disease. 

I  do  not  see  why  they  should  be  blamed  for 
not  applying  to  their  contemporaries  a  scale  based 
on  the  permanent  values  of  literature.  They  are 
not  engaged  in  an  occupation  that  admits  of  such 
a  thing.  No  one  in  their  situation  could  judge 
fairly  his  contemporaries,  even  if  it  be  assumed 
that  contemporaries  can  ever  be  fairly  judged. 
They  are  wedged  in  so  tight  with  contemporary 
minds  that  they  cannot  even  get  a  square  look  at 
them.  But  they  persist  in  employing  words  that 
imply  a  permanent  value  in  some  merely  momen 
tary  thing  and  they  mislead  a  general  reader, 
who,  as  he  is  not  devouring  current  fiction  in  such 
quantities  as  they  are,  has  more  space  in  his 
thoughts  for  perspective.  Hence  they  always 
seem  in  any  proportionate  view  of  the  thing 
profuse  and  niggardly  by  turns — arms  out  to-day 
to  a  Mr.  Merrick  or  a  Mr.  Walpole,  backs  turned 
perhaps  to-morrow  on  some  poor  American,  just 
as  good  as  they,  who  is  naturally  thinking,  How 
about  me  ?  They  are  to  blame  rather  for  misusing 
the  words  of  literary  criticism.  In  the  circum 
stances  they  should  not  be  used  at  all.  It  is  a 
journalistic  subject  and  requires  a  journalistic 
treatment,  but  there  is  such  a  fidgetting  with  liter 
ary  terms  that  somehow  they  always  mislead  you. 


THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

It  is  not  speaking  ill  of  fiction  of  this  class  to 
call  it  merely  journalism,  as  critics  for  a  genera 
tion  past  have  been  doing;  it  is  speaking  well  of 
journalism.  It  has  a  wider  liberty  than  other 
kinds  of  journalism  and  a  somewhat  longer  hold, 
but  it  does  not  last  long  and  what  is  more,  the 
makers  of  it  do  not  expect  it  to  last  long.  Essen 
tially  it  is  on  the  exact  level  of  dozens  of  respect 
able  periodicals,  as  everybody  concerned  in  it  or 
about  it  is  aware.  Yet  reviewers  who  never  speak 
of  the  appearance  of  the  last  month's  magazines 
with  any  literary  emotion,  will  report  almost  any 
novel  as  a  literary  event,  or  condemn  it  because 
it  is  not  one.  It  seems  as  if  they  might  avoid 
extremes  in  the  one  case  as  well  as  in  the  other. 
Surely  this  situation  has  lasted  long  enough  for 
familiarity  to  supervene.  If  I  saw  a  man  while 
reading  the  London  Spectator  fall  from  his  chair 
in  a  fit  of  laughter,  if  I  saw  some  elderly  gentle 
man  throw  the  Atlantic  Monthly  up  in  the  air  with 
shouts  of  joy,  I  should  suppose  of  course  that 
each  of  them  was  out  of  his  mind.  When  review 
ers  of  fiction  behave  as  they  constantly  do  in  this 
same  manner  over  events  that  are  no  whit  more 
significant,  it  is  not  necessary,  perhaps,  to  take  so 
serious  a  view  of  their  condition  of  mind;  but  it 
is  natural  to  suppose  that  they  are  the  unconscious 
victims  of  the  malady  that  I  have  described. 


HOW  TO  HATE  SHAKESPEARE 

When  I  read  M.  Georges  Pellissier's  book  on 
Shakespeare  some  years  ago  I  could  not  see  why 
he  should  have  lashed  himself  to  Shakespeare  in 
that  hostile  intimacy.  Probably  no  other  English 
poet  could  have  been  found,  except  perhaps 
Browning,  who  would  so  essentially  offend  his 
modern,  Gallic  intelligence,  and  one  would  think 
M.  Pellissier,  after  yawning  through  a  half- 
dozen  of  the  plays,  would  have  smiled  or  cursed 
according  as  his  impulse  prompted,  and  thrown 
the  rest  of  them  away.  Instead  of  that  he 
dragged  his  incompatible  mind  not  only  through 
the  whole  length  of  Shakespeare's  dramas,  but 
over  a  large  area  of  the  dullest  Shakespearean 
criticism  as  well.  It  seemed  heroic  but  singularly 
unnecessary.  It  was  as  if,  on  meeting  a  woman 
whom  he  particularly  disliked,  he  had  straightway 
married  her  and  then  taken  notes  for  the  next 
ten  years  in  corroboration  of  his  disagreeable  first 
impressions.  Never  was  a  man  more  diligent  in 
the  accumulation  of  ennui.  He  turned  the  plays 
inside  out  for  evil  instances  and  he  gathered  them 

145 


i46l    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

in  awful  heaps — bad  puns,  platitudes,  pleonasms, 
contradictions,  incoherencies,  bombast,  mixed 
metaphors,  and  bungled  plots — in  short,  every 
fault  of  style,  structure,  character  analysis  or 
moral  teaching  that  a  life-long,  conscientious 
hater  of  the  bard  could  lay  his  hands  on — and  as 
they  were  all  rendered  in  perfectly  commonplace 
modern  French,  they  presented  a  sorry  spectacle. 
It  was  as  honest  and  thorough  a  job  in  damnation 
as  had  been  done  in  many  a  year,  and  for  that 
reason  very  interesting.  Any  one  who  really 
hated  a  poet  could  find  there  an  admirable  illustra 
tion  of  the  way  to  go  about  it. 

First  of  all  there  were  the  outrageous  liberties 
which  Shakespeare  takes  with  the  sacred  unities 
of  time  and  place  and  action.  M.  Pellissier  pro 
fessed  to  be  more  liberal  than  Aristotle  in  that 
matter,  but  his  nerves  went  all  to  pieces  amidst 
the  riotings  of  Shakespeare.  Why,  there  are 
seven  changes  of  place  in  the  second  act  of  "The 
Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,"  and  six  in  the  first 
act  of  "Coriolanus,"  and  thirteen  in  the  third  act 
of  "Antony  and  Cleopatra,"  ranging  over  three 
continents,  all  that  was  then  known  of  the  surface 
of  the  globe!  And  as  to  time,  in  some  plays  the 
action  is  supposed  to  run  for  years,  which  is 
manifestly  incredible,  while  in  others  it  is  tele 
scoped  into  so  tight  a  compass  that  villainy  has 
no  chance  to  germinate  or  passion  to  expand. 


HOW  TO  HATE  SHAKESPEARE     147 

How  is  a  character  to  develop  in  three  hours? 
How  could  the  events  of  ''Measure  for  Measure" 
squeeze  themselves  into  a  week?  Fancy  M. 
Hervieu  doing  such  a  thing,  or  Donnay,  Mirbeau, 
Brieux,  Capus,  or  even  Rostand.  Macbeth  could 
not  have  become  so  ambitious  as  he  was  in  four 
days,  or  Othello  so  jealous.  In  "The  Tempest" 
Prospero  puts  Ferdinand  to  the  trial  by  making 
him  carry  logs  and  finally  releases  him  and  re 
wards  him  with  the  hand  of  Miranda  in  these 
words : 

All  thy  vexations 

Were  but  my  trials  of  thy  love,  and  thou 
Hast  strangely  stood  the  test.  .  .  . 
Then,  as  my  gift,  and  thine  own  acquisition 
Worthily  purchased,  take  my  daughter — 

But  says  M.  Pellissier,  watch  in  hand,  how  long 
has  Ferdinand  actually  been  at  this  log  business? 
He  did  not  lift  a  single  log  till  after  the  close  of 
the  first  act,  and  he  left  off  logging  immediately 
before  the  beginning  of  the  fourth.  Thus  his 
logging  activities  could  have  lasted  no  more  than 
a  single  hour!  Considering  what  the  Charity  Or 
ganization  demands  of  a  tramp  in  return  for  a 
night's  lodging,  Ferdinand  was  grossly  overpaid. 

Although  he  found  the  logs  very  heavy,  would  an  hour 
of  that  work  suffice,  as  his  father-in-law  said,  for  the 
"worthy  purchase"  of  Miranda? 


1481    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

The  matter  seemed  all  the  more  unpardonable 
when  Prospero's  lines  were  rendered  in  such 
words  as  these — 

Les  tourments  que  je  t'ai  infliges  devaient  eprouver  ton 
amour;  tu  les  as  merveilleusement  supportes,  etc. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  action  of  the  "Winter's 
Tale"  skips  sixteen  years  and  the  figure  of  Time 
appears  on  the  stage  and  "without  any  scruple" 
tells  the  audience  what  has  happened.  Yet  in  this 
very  play  Shakespeare  rushes  the  King  into  a 
jealous  fit  more  suddenly  than  M.  Pellissier  has 
ever  seen  a  jealous  fit  come  on. 

Then  many  of  the  plays  tell  several  stories  at 
once.  "Cymbeline"  tells  three,  and  so  does  "The 
Taming  of  the  Shrew;"  "King  Lear"  tells  not 
only  the  tale  of  the  old  King  betrayed  by  his 
daughters,  but  that  of  Gloucester  betrayed  by  his 
son;  "Timon  of  Athens"  breaks  off  when  it  is 
about  half-way  through,  and  takes  Alcibiades  for 
its  new  hero;  "The  Merchant  of  Venice"  spins 
two  yarns  which  essentially  have  nothing  in 
common. 

So  M.  Pellissier  ran  on,  with  mounting  indig 
nation. 

And  in  "The  Merchant  of  Venice"  Shakespeare 
does  not  even  respect  the  rules  of  simple  arithme 
tic,  for  when  Jessica  tells  Portia  that  she  has  over 
heard  Shylock  say  that  he  loves  the  pound  of 


HOW  TO  HATE  SHAKESPEARE     149 

Antonio's  flesh  more  than  twenty  times  three  thou 
sand  ducats,  Portia  offers  at  first  to  pay  him  six 
thousand  ducats,  and  later  says  she  will  double 
it  if  necessary  and  even  triple  that  result.  But 
says  Pellissier,  this  is  by  no  means  the  right 
amount.  "Twenty  times  the  sum  due  is  sixty  thou 
sand  ducats,  and  6,000x2x3,  is  only  thirty-six 
thousand,  a  little  more  than  half."  He  finds 
"The  Merchant  of  Venice,"  indeed,  very  objec 
tionable  from  almost  every  point  of  view:  Its 
moral  teachings  are  bad,  as  when  Bassanio  wins 
Portia's  hand  in  the  casket  test,  though  he  de 
served  no  better  than  either  of  the  other  suitors; 
it  tells  two  stories  instead  of  one;  and  above  all 
it  drags  along  through  an  utterly  worthless  fifth 
act,  when  a  few  words  added  to  the  fourth  would 
have  supplied  all  that  was  necessary.  The  fact 
that  this  same  worthless  fifth  act  contains  some  of 
the  finest  and  most  familiar  lines  in  all  Shakes 
peare's  writings  does  not  concern  him,  if  indeed 
he  ever  observed  it.  Punctuality,  not  poetry,  is 
the  thing. 

He  is  shocked  by  the  shameful  waste  of  time 
on  light  characters  and  hates  all  those  non-essen 
tial  clowns,  court  fools,  pedants,  drunkards, 
thieves,  eccentrics.  What  is  the  use  of  Dogberry 
and  Verges?  We  find  them  first  giving  their  tire 
some  instructions  to  their  men;  again,  when  they 
make  their  report  to  the  governor,  who  is  naturally 


150    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

much  irritated  by  their  sottise;  again,  in  prison, 
questioning  the  accused;  again  before  the  gover 
nor;  and  once  more  after  that.  Even  if  these 
"two  stupid  police  officers"  were  as  amusing  as 
Shakespeare  probably  thought  them,  they  would 
still  be  absolutely  useless;  but  as  a  matter  of  fact 
they  are  dull  buffoons  fit  only  for  a  vulgar  street 
show.  And  what  a  waste  of  time  are  the  fooleries 
of  Sir  Toby  Belch,  Sir  Andrew  Aguecheek,  Touch 
stone,  Lancelot  Gobbo,  Speed,  Lance,  Bottom,  the 
Dromios,  Poor  Tom,  the  grave-diggers  and  play 
ers  in  "Hamlet,"  Mercutio,  Trinculo,  Stephano, 
and  the  rest.  Like  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  he  has  an 
especial  aversion  for  the  melancholy  Jaques — 

JAQUES.    I'll  give  you  a  verse  to  this  note,  that  I  made 
yesterday  in  despite  of  my  invention. 
AMIENS.    And  I'll  sing  it. 
JAQUES.    Thus  it  goes : 

If  it  do  come  to  pass 
That  any  man  turn  ass, 
Leaving  his  wealth  and  ease 
A  stubborn  will  to  please. 

Ducdame,  ducdame,  ducdame. 

Here  shall  he  see 

Gross  fools  as  he, 

And  if  he  will  come  to  me. 

AMIENS.    What's  that  "Ducdame"? 


HOW  TO  HATE  SHAKESPEARE     1 5 1 

JAQUES.  'Tis  a  Greek  invocation  to  call  fools  into  a 
circle.  I'll  go  sleep  if  I  can;  if  I  cannot,  I'll  rail  against 
all  the  first-born  of  Egypt. 

What  philosophy  is  there  in  this?  asks  M. 
Pellissier. 

From  these  citations  I  think  it  will  be  plain  to 
anyone  who  at  any  period  of  his  life  has  found 
pleasure  in  reading  Shakespeare  that  M.  Pellissier 
has  by  an  accident  of  birth  been  for  ever  debarred 
from  sharing  in  it.  Therein  he  resembles  the 
Shakespeare  commentators.  To  him,  as  to  the 
commentator,  Shakespeare  is  not  a  source  of  pleas 
ure,  but  a  task.  Among  us  common,  careless  folk, 
Shakespeare  is  not  necessarily  a  sad  matter,  but 
on  the  strange  assiduous  tribe  who  live  in  foot 
notes  he  has  laid  a  cruel  burden.  Nothing  can 
persuade  a  layman  that  the  Shakespeare  scholars 
are  not  men  who  privately  loathe  Shakespeare. 
Otherwise,  why  their  amazing  marginal  irrele- 
vancies? 

Act  L,  Sc.  II.,  Line  20,  Note  56.  "Biting."  Often 
used  metaphorically  by  Shakespeare.  So  of  "nipping" 
Cf.  "a  nipping  and  an  eager  air." 

They  write  their  notes,  like  schoolboys  marking 
up  their  text-books'  margins.  In  Shakespeare's 
company  and  longing  for  escape,  they  pass  the 
time  in  queer,  superfluous  labors,  memory  exploits, 


152    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

and  verbal  divagations,  sometimes  quoting  all  the 
passages  that  resemble  a  little  the  one  in  hand, 
sometimes  all  the  lines  they  can  think  of  that  do 
not  at  all  resemble  it,  not  knowing  what  to  do,  yet 
bound  to  seem  busy,  hence  elucidating,  collating, 
emending,  bickering  with  some  other  commentator 
fifty  years  dead,  expounding  prepositions,  ex 
pounding  anything,  merely  to  relieve  the  awful 
tedium  of  being  alone  with  Shakespeare.  Hating 
poetry,  they  collect  adverbs,  or  explain  discrep 
ancies  in  the  time  of  day,  or  quote  the  moral  re 
flections  of  some  tired  predecessor.  I  have  seen 
a  sentiment  from  Dr.  Johnson  which  no  free-born 
Anglo-American  reader  would  remember  for  five 
minutes  hoarded  by  these  forlorn  sub-Shakes 
pearean  Crustacea  for  five  generations.  And  they 
are  under  no  compulsion.  That  is  what  puzzles 
every  care-free  person — why  this  especially  un 
sympathetic  class  of  men  should  have  ever  gone 
into  the  business  at  all,  when  there  are  chess, 
stamp-collecting,  autographs,  numismatics,  golf, 
peace  movements,  book-plates,  gardening,  pressed 
flowers,  social  welfare  work,  taxidermy,  solitaire 
— so  many  perfectly  respectable  occupations,  at  a 
safe  distance  from  the  hated  bard. 

And  the  best  thing  in  M.  Pellissier's  book  is 
the  vengeance  it  takes  on  them.  The  same  sort 
of  reasons  that  they  have  hypocritically  presented 
for  a  hundred  years  as  ground  for  loving  Shakes- 


HOW  TO  HATE  SHAKESPEARE     153 

peare  are  here  presented  with  greater  force  as 
ground  for  hating  him.  So  he  strips  the  mask 
from  the  other  unimaginative  scholars  who  pre 
ceded  him  and  reveals  their  sullen  faces. 


CONFESSIONS  OF  A  GALLOMANIAC 

I  have  no  idea  what  Mr.  George  Moore  meant 
by  saying  in  one  of  his  literary  discussions  that 
Americans  write  better  than  Englishmen  because 
they  are  safer  from  French  influence.  It  seems 
quite  obvious  to  me  that  Americans  write  worse 
than  Englishmen,  and  that  one  of  the  reasons  for 
it  is  that  they  are  under  English  influence.  Per 
haps  if  they  went  by  way  of  France  there  might 
be  a  chance  of  their  escape  from  the  prolonged 
colonialism  of  American  letters  and  there  would 
at  least  be  the  benefit  of  variety.  Our  writers  are 
a  timid  people,  like  the  conies,  and  in  all  prob 
ability  they  would  still  be  imitating  something  but 
they  would  at  least  be  imitating  something  further 
off.  I  could  pick  out  twelve  rather  important 
American  novelists  on  whom  the  experiment  could 
have  been  tried  without  the  least  danger  to  current 
literature.  And  take  the  case  of  Mr.  George 
Moore  himself.  Having  but  little  power  of  self- 
analysis  he  would  probably  not  know  what  had 
been  best  for  him,  but  even  he  would  hardly  wish 
to  have  escaped  his  French  experience.  He  is 
better,  not  worse,  for  his  resemblance  to  Flaubert. 

154 


A   GALLOMANIAC  155 

Not  to  imply  that  he  has  taken  Flaubert  as  a 
model;  I  do  not  even  know  whether  he  has  given 
him  a  thought;  but  his  style  in  English  is  the  pre 
cise  equivalent  of  Flaubert's — delicate,  flexible,  in 
evitable.  One  may  not  like  what  Mr.  George 
Moore  says  but  one  cannot  easily  imagine,  espe 
cially  in  his  earlier  novels,  that  there  could  be  any 
other  way  of  saying  it.  That,  I  believe,  is  a 
French  and  not  an  English  characteristic. 

However,!  am  not  concerned  here  with  the  train 
ing  of  Mr.  George  Moore  or  with  the  redemp 
tion  of  American  novelists,  but  with  my  own  small 
affairs.  How  to  expose  myself  sufficiently  to  that 
same  French  influence  which  he  considered  so 
disastrous  to  the  English  language  had  been  my 
problem  during  the  entire  period  of  the  war. 
Down  to  the  outbreak  of  the  war  I  had  no 
more  desire  to  converse  with  a  Frenchman  in 
his  own  language  than  with  a  modern  Greek. 
I  thought  I  understood  French  well  enough 
for  my  own  purposes,  because  I  had  read  it  off  and 
on  for  twenty  years,  but  when  the  war  aroused 
sympathies  and  sharpened  curiosities  that  I  had 
not  felt  before,  I  realized  the  width  of  the  chasm 
that  cut  me  off  from  what  I  wished  to  feel.  Nor 
could  it  be  bridged  by  any  of  the  academic,  natural, 
or  commercial  methods  that  I  knew  of.  They  were 
were  either  too  slow  or  they  led  in  directions  that 
I  did  not  wish  to  go.  I  had  not  the  slightest  de- 


THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

sire  to  call  taxis,  buy  tickets,  check  trunks  and 
board  sleeping-cars  all  through  Europe,  since  I 
doubted  if  I  should  go  there.  Neither  did  I  wish 
to  draw  elaborate  comparisons  at  some  boarding- 
house  table  between  Central  Park  and  the  Bois  de 
Boulogne.  I  tried  a  phonograph,  and  after  many 
bouts  with  it  I  acquired  part  of  a  sermon  by  Bos- 
suet  and  real  fluency  in  discussing  a  quinsy  sore 
throat  with  a  Paris  physician,  in  case  I  ever  went 
there  and  had  one.  I  took  fourteen  conversation 
lessons  from  Mme.  Garnet,  and  being  rather  well 
on  in  years  at  the  start,  I  should,  if  I  had  kept 
on  diligently,  be  able  at  the  age  of  eighty-five  to 
inquire  faultlessly  my  way  to  the  post-office.  I 
could  already  ask  for  butter  and  sing  a  song  writ 
ten  by  Henry  IV — when  my  teacher  went  to 
France  to  take  care  of  her  half-brother's  children 
by  his  second  wife,  their  father  having  been  killed 
in  the  trenches.  I  will  say  this  for  Mme  Garnet. 
I  came  to  understand  perfectly  the  French  for  all 
her  personal  and  family  affairs.  No  human  being 
has  ever  confided  in  me  so  abundantly  as  she  did. 
No  human  being  has  ever  so  sternly  repressed  any 
answering  confidences  of  my  own.  Her  method 
of  instruction,  if  it  was  one,  was  that  of  jealous, 
relentless,  unbridled  soliloquy. 

Thrown  on  the  world  with  no  power  of  sustain 
ing  a  conversation  on  any  other  subject  than  the 
members  of  the  Garnet  family,  I  nevertheless  re- 


A   GALLOMANIAC  157 

solved  to  take  no  more  lessons  but  to  hunt  down 
French  people  and  make  them  talk.  What  I 
really  needed  was  a  governess  to  take  me  to  and 
from  my  office  and  into  the  park  at  noon,  but 
at  my  age  that  was  out  of  the  question.  Then  be 
gan  a  career  of  hypocritical  benevolence.  I 
scraped  acquaintance  with  every  Frenchman  whom 
I  heard  talking  English  very  badly,  and  I  became 
immensely  interested  in  his  welfare.  I  formed 
the  habit  of  introducing  visiting  Frenchmen  to 
French-speaking  Americans  and  sitting,  with  open 
mouth,  in  the  flow  of  their  conversation.  Then 
I  fell  in  with  M.  Bernou,  the  commissioner  who 
was  over  here  buying  guns  and  whose  English 
and  my  French  were  so  much  alike  that  we  agreed 
to  interchange  them.  We  met  daily  for  two  weeks 
and  walked  for  an  hour  in  the  park,  each  tearing 
at  the  other's  language.  Our  conversations,  as  I 
look  back  on  them,  must  have  run  about  like  this : 

"It  calls  to  walk,"  said  he,  smiling  brilliantly. 

"It  is  good  morning,"  said  I,  "better  than  I  had  ex 
tended." 

"I  was  at  you  yestairday  ze  morning,  but  I  deed  not 
find." 

"I  was  obliged  to  leap  early,"  said  I,  "and  I  was  busy 
standing  up  straight  all  around  the  forenoon." 

"The  book  I  prayed  you  send,  he  came,  and  I  thank, 
but  positively  are  you  not  deranged?" 

"Don't   talk,"   said    I.      "Never   talk   again.      It  was 


i58i    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

really  nothing  anywhere.  I  had  been  very  happy,  I  re 
assure." 

"Pardon,  I  glide,  I  glode.  There  was  the  hide  of  a 
banane.  Did  I  crash  you?" 

"I  noticed  no  insults,"  I  replied.  "You  merely  gnawed 
my  arm." 

Gestures  and  smiles  of  perfect  understanding. 

I  do  not  know  whether  Bernou,  who  like  myself 
was  middle-aged,  felt  as  I  did  on  these  occasions, 
but  by  the  suppression  of  every  thought  that  I 
could  not  express  in  my  childish  vocabulary,  I 
came  to  feel  exactly  like  a  child.  They  said  I 
ought  to  think  in  French  and  I  tried  to  do  so, 
but  thinking  in  French  when  there  is  so  little 
French  to  think  with,  divests  the  mind  of  its  ac 
quisitions  of  forty  years.  Experience  slips  away 
for  there  are  not  words  enough  to  lay  hold  of  it, 
and  the  soul  is  bounded  by  the  present  tense.  The 
exigencies  of  the  concrete  and  the  immediate  were 
so  pressing  that  reflection  had  no  chance.  Knowl 
edge  of  good  and  evil  did  not  exist;  the  sins  had 
no  names;  and  the  mind  under  its  linguistic  limita 
tions  was  like  a  rather  defective  toy  Noah's  ark. 
From  the  point  of  view  of  Bernou's  and  my  vocab 
ulary,  Central  Park  was  as  the  Garden  of  Eden 
after  six  months — new  and  unnamed  things  every 
where.  A  dog,  a  tree,  a  statue,  taxed  all  our 
powers  of  description,  and  on  a  complex  matter 
like  a  policeman  our  minds  could  not  meet  at  all. 


A   GALLOMANIAC  159 

We  could  only  totter  together  a  few  ste*ps  in  any 
mental  direction,  but  there  was  a  real  pleasure  in 
this  earnest  interchange  of  insipidities  and  they 
were  highly  valued  on  each  side.  For  my  part  I 
shall  always  like  Bernou,  and  feel  toward  him  as 
my  childhood's  friend,  and  I  hope,  when  we  meet 
again,  I  at  sixty,  he  at  fifty-five,  we  may  stand 
together  on  a  bridge  and  pluck  the  petals  from  a 
daisy  and  count  them  as  they  fall  into  the  river, 
he  in  English,  I  in  French.  I  wonder  if  Bernou 
noticed  that  I  was  an  old,  battered  man,  bothered 
with  a  tiresome  profession.  I  certainly  never  sus 
pected  that  he  was.  His  language  utterly  failed 
to  give  me  that  impression. 

Why  should  Seneca  say  it  is  an  utterly  ridiculous 
and  disgraceful  thing  to  be  an  elementary  old 
man?  Unless  a  man,  as  he  grows  old,  gains  his 
second  simplicity,  he  is  either  already  dead  or 
damned.  There  is  but  one  right  passion  for  ad 
vancing  years  and  that  is  curiosity,  and  curiosity 
implies  the  acceptance  of  one's  mental  inferiority 
toward  an  insect,  toward  a  language,  toward  a 
man.  Curiosity  is  never  gratified  in  conversations 
as  I  hear  them  at  my  club  or  as  I  recall  them  at 
successful  dinner-parties,  long  since  mercifully 
gone  by.  Talk  among  respectable  middle-aged 
New  Yorkers  is  either  an  alternate  pelting  with 
opinions  or  a  competitive  endeavor  to  shine. 
When  old  Foggs,  throwing  down  his  newspaper, 


160     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

bears  down  on  me  with  his  views  on  labor  unions, 
which  I  have  known  for  seven  years,  it  is  not  from 
any  wish  to  talk  with  me.  He  regards  me  as  his 
mental  pocket-handkerchief.  In  revenge  I  blow 
my  views  of  Wilson  on  him  and  off  he  goes.  Each 
of  us  really  hates  to  receive  all  that  the  other 
has  to  give  him.  After  conversing  thirty  years 
in  New  York  in  the  English  language,  I  have 
found  that,  if  I  am  to  preserve  an  interest  in  my 
species,  I  must  begin  again  in  another  tongue. 
One  must  begin  again  at  something  in  middle  life, 
back  in  the  woods,  back  on  the  farm  or  in  the 
garden,  or  down  at  the  bottom  of  the  French 
language.  Otherwise  one  will  fall  among  those 
dreadful  and  anachronistic  fogies;  galvanized 
spectators  of  sports  they  cannot  share  in;  trailers 
of  youth  to  whom  they  are  a  nuisance ;  ever  freshly 
Harvard  or  freshly  Yale.  Seneca  was  true  to  his 
theory  of  sophistication  to  the  end,  and  so  very 
properly  bled  himself  to  death  in  the  bathtub. 

After  I  lost  Bernou  I  fastened  upon  an  un 
frocked  priest  who  had  come  over  here  and  gone 
into  the  shoe  trade,  a  small,  foxy  man,  who  re 
garded  me,  I  think,  in  the  light  of  an  aggressor. 
He  wanted  to  become  completely  American  and 
forget  France,  and  as  I  was  trying  to  reverse  the 
process,  I  rather  got  in  his  way.  He  could  talk 
of  mediaeval  liturgies  and  his  present  occupation, 
but  nothing  in  between,  and  as  he  spoke  English 


A   GALLOMANIAC  161 

very  well,  his  practical  mind  revolted  at  the  use 
of  a  medium  of  communication  in  which  one  of  us 
almost  strangled  when  there  was  another  available 
in  which  we  both  were  at  ease.  I  could  not  pump 
much  French  out  of  him.  He  would  burst  into 
English  rather  resentfully.  Then  I  took  to  the 
streets  at  lunch-time  and  tried  newsdealers,  book 
shops,  restaurants,  invented  imaginary  errands, 
bought  things  that  I  did  not  want,  and  exchanged 
them  for  objects  even  less  desirable.  That  kept  a 
little  conversation  going  day  by  day,  but  on  the 
whole  it  was  a  dry  season.  It  is  a  strange  thing. 
There  are  more  than  thirty  thousand  of  them  in 
the  city  of  New  York,  and  I  had  always  heard  that 
the  French  are  a  clannish  folk  and  hate  to  learn 
another  language,  but  most  of  my  overtures  in 
French  brought  only  English  upon  me.  The  more 
pains  I  took  the  more  desirable  it  seemed  to  them 
that  I  should  be  spared  the  trouble  of  continuing. 
I  could  not  explain  the  situation.  I  was  always 
diving  into  French  and  they  were  always  pulling 
me  out  again.  They  thought  they  were  humane. 
After  all,  hunting  down  French  people  in  the 
city  of  New  York  who  spoke  English  worse  than 
I  spoke  French,  was  as  good  an  exercise  as  golf, 
and  it  took  less  time.  One  reason  why  a  good 
deal  of  skill  is  required  is  because  they  hate  broken 
French  worse  than  most  of  us  hate  broken  English. 
Then  there  is  of  course  that  natural  instinct  to 


i6a    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

alleviate  apparently  needless  suffering,  and  my 
object  was  to  stave  off  rescue  as  long  as  possible. 
When  dragged  out  into  the  light  of  English  I  tried 
to  talk  just  as  foolishly  in  order  that  they  might 
think  it  was  not  really  my  French  that  was  the 
matter  with  me.  Sometimes  that  worked  quite 
well.  Finding  me  just  as  idiotic  in  my  own  lan 
guage  they  went  back  to  theirs.  It  certainly 
worked  well  with  my  friend  M.  Bartet,  a  para 
lytic  tobacconist  in  the  West  Thirties  near  the 
river,  to  whom  my  relation  was  for  several  months 
that  of  a  grandchild,  though,  I  believe  we  were 
of  the  same  age.  He  tried  to  form  my  character 
by  bringing  me  up  on  such  praiseworthy  episodes 
of  his  early  life  as  he  thought  I  was  able  to  grasp. 

Now  at  the  end  of  a  long  year  of  these  persist 
ent  puerilities  I  am  able  to  report  two  definite 
results :  In  the  first  place  a  sense  of  my  incapacity 
and  ignorance  infinitely  vaster  than  when  I  began, 
and  in  the  second  a  profound  distrust,  possibly 
vindictive  in  its  origin,  of  all  Americans  in  the  city 
of  New  York  who  profess  an  acquaintance  with 
French  culture,  including  teachers,  critics,  theater 
audiences,  lecture  audiences  and  patronesses  of 
visiting  Frenchmen. 

It  was  perhaps  true,  as  people  said  at  the  time, 
that  a  certain  French  theatrical  experiment  in  New 
York  could  not  continue  for  the  simple  reason 
that  it  was  too  good  a  thing  for  the  theatre-going 


A   GALLOMANIAC  163 

public  to  support.  It  may  be  that  the  precise 
equivalent  of  the  enterprise,  even  if  not  hampered 
by  a  foreign  language,  could  not  have  permanently 
endured.  Yet  from  what  I  saw  of  its  audiences, 
critics,  enthusiasts,  and  from  what  I  know  of  the 
American  Gallophile  generally,  including  myself, 
I  believe  the  linguistic  obstacle  to  have  been  more 
serious  than  they  would  have  us  suppose — serious 
enough  to  account  for  the  situation  without  drag 
ging  in  our  aesthetic  incapacity.  It  was  certainly 
an  obstacle  that  less  than  one-half  of  any  audience 
ever  succeeded  in  surmounting. 

I  do  not  mean  that  the  rest  of  the  audience  got 
nothing  out  of  it,  for  so  expressive  were  the  play 
ers  by  other  means  than  words,  that  they  often 
sketched  the  play  out  in  pantomime.  The  physical 
activities  of  the  troupe  did  not  arise,  as  some  of 
the  critics  declared,  from  the  vivacity  of  the  Gallic 
temperament;  nor  were  they  assumed,  as  others 
believed,  because  in  the  seventeenth  century  French 
actors  had  been  acrobats.  These  somewhat  ex 
aggerated  gestures  were  occasioned  by  the  percep 
tion  that  the  majority  of  the  spectators  were  be 
ginners  in  French.  They  were  supplied  by  these 
ever-tactful  people  as  a  running  translation  for  a 
large  body  of  self-improving  Americans. 

But  while  no  doubt  almost  everybody  caught, 
as  he  would  have  said,  the  gist  of  the  thing,  though 
not  quite  understanding  all  the  words,  very  few, 


i  64     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

I  believe,  were  in  any  condition  to  judge  of  the 
play  as  a  play.  This  seemed  particularly  true 
when  reading  the  published  commentaries.  The 
players  deserved  all  the  eulogies  they  received, 
but  if  they  could  have  beheld  the  inner  state  of  the 
eulogists  they  would  not  have  felt  in  the  slightest 
degree  buoyed  up. 

La  Fontaine's  Enchanted  Cup,  for  example,  as 
produced  by  these  players,  was  admirable,  and  a 
certain  New  York  play  reviewer  was  entirely  justi 
fied  in  speaking  of  it  in  the  highest  terms,  but  the 
fact  that  he  thought  the  words  for  an  "enchanted 
cup"  really  meant  an  "exchanged  coupe"  detracted 
a  little  from  the  value  of  his  testimony. 

This  may  have  been  rather  an  extreme  instance 
among  the  commentators,  but  there  were  approxi 
mations  to  it  on  all  sides  and  particularly  among 
those  people  who  adored,  as  they  said,  the  French 
drama,  French  art,  the  fine,  frank  simplicity  of 
the  French  character,  and  above  all  the  incompar 
able  lucidity  of  the  French  language  and  the  in 
imitable  manner  that  the  French  have  of  saying 
tEings.  For  though  we  Gallophiles  may  some 
times  get  a  little  bit  mixed  up;  though  we  may 
mistake  a  bad  player  for  a  good  one,  and  prose  for 
poetry,  and  a  commonplace  for  a  shining  epigram; 
though  we  may  confound  a  horse-cab  with  a  crystal 
vessel,  and  humor  with  obscenity;  though,  as  we 
would  say,  these  nuances  may  to  a  certain  extent 


A   GALLOMANIAC  165 

be  lost  upon  us,  it  does  not  follow  that  our  love 
of  French  things  is  any  less  intense,  and  it  cer 
tainly  is  no  less  panegyrical.  But  it  does  follow, 
I  believe,  that  at  that  particular  moment  we  were 
not  quite  ripe  for  a  serious  encounter  with  the 
French  drama  when  rendered  in  actual  French; 
and  its  discontinuance  was  no  reflection  on  our 
artistic  taste.  We  had  not  reached  the  stage  at 
which  artistic  taste  emerges.  We  were  far  away 
from  the  intimacies  of  art,  battling  in  the  outskirts 
of  comprehension. 

"Messieurs  et  mesdames:  During  my  six  weeks*  sojourn 
in  your  wonderful  country  I  have  realized  that  America 
is  one  thing  above  all  others.  It  is  the  land  of  oppor 
tunity." — Enthusiastic  applause. 

The  welcome  accorded  to  certain  French  lec 
turers  by  our  great  universities,  society  leaders  and 
women's  clubs  during  the  war  made  no  unfair 
distinctions.  It  was  not  withheld  merely  because 
the  lecturer  through  no  fault  of  his  own,  had 
nothing  to  say;  nor  was  the  applause  reserved  for 
the  better  portions  of  his  discourse,  or  even  for 
those  portions  which  were  intelligible.  One  of 
the  most  successful  lectures  ever  delivered  before 
a  woman's  club  in  New  York  City  was  given  by  a 
Frenchman,  who,  having  taken  a  severe  cold,  was 
entirely  inaudible  from  beginning  to  end.  The 
applause  was  almost  continuous.  In  the  warmth 


1 6$    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

of  our  ardor  for  France  one  Frenchman  was  as 
good  as  another,  just  as  after  the  first  intoxication 
any  brand  of  wine  will  do.  The  one  French  con- 
ferencier  from  whom  all  good  Gallophiles  should 
immediately  have  fled  was,  by  a  strange  mischance, 
precisely  the  one  that  riveted  their  attention. 
Three  of  our  leading  universities  and  huge  bands 
of  our  socially  important  womanhood  succumbed 
instantly  to  his  charm.  It  is  to  the  honor  of  the 
French  nation  that  it  sent  over  to  us  as  a  rule 
only  perfectly  sensible  persons;  but  it  really  was 
not  necessary.  It  might  have  sent  over  imbeciles 
and  in  the  very  centre  of  our  American  French 
culture  no  one  would  have  noticed  anything  amiss. 
In  the  present  state  of  our  knowledge  subtle  dis 
tinctions  of  this  sort  are  thrown  away  on  us. 

We  can  pay  Frenchmen  every  compliment  in 
the  world  except  that  of  telling  them  apart.  Even 
our  most  cultivated  critics,  having  it  on  good  au 
thority  that  a  gifted  French  author  has  a  brilliant 
style,  will  generally  quote  by  a  strange  fatality  the 
rare  passages  in  his  writings  that  are  entirely 
commonplace. 

I  do  not  blame  other  Americans  for  dabbling  in 
French,  since  I  myself  am  the  worst  of  dabblers, 
but  I  see  no  reason  why  any  of  us  should  pretend 
that  it  is  anything  more  than  dabbling.  The  usual 
way  of  reading  French  does  not  lead  even  to  an 
acquaintance  with  French  literature.  Everybody 


A   GALLOMANIAC  167 

knows  that  words  in  a  living  language  in  order 
to  be  understood  have  to  be  lived  with.  They 
are  not  felt  as  a  part  of  living  literature  when  you 
see  them  pressed  out  and  labeled  in  a  glossary, 
but  only  when  you  hear  them  fly  about.  A  word 
is  not  a  definite  thing  susceptible  of  dictionary  ex 
planation.  It  is  a  cluster  of  associations,  reminis 
cent  of  the  sort  of  men  that  used  it,  suggestive 
of  social  class,  occupation,  mood,  dignity  or  the 
lack  of  it,  primness,  violences,  pedantries  or  plati 
tudes.  It  hardly  seems  necessary  to  say  that  words 
in  a  living  literature  ought  to  ring  in  the  ear  with 
the  sounds  that  really  belong  to  them,  or  that 
poetry  without  an  echo  cannot  be  felt.  Poetry  if 
it  rings  in  the  ears  of  the  usual  American  reader 
of  French  literature  must  inevitably  make  a  noise 
that  in  no  wise  resembles  any  measured  human 
sound;  it  is  merely  a  punctuated  din.  But  prob 
ably  it  does  not  sound  at  all;  it  is  probably  read 
as  stenographic  notes. 

It  may  be  that  there  is  no  way  out  of  it.  Per 
haps  it  is  inevitable  that  the  colleges  which  had 
so  long  taught  the  dead  languages  as  if  they  were 
buried  should  now  teach  the  living  ones  as  if  they 
were  dead.  But  there  is  no  need  of  pretending 
that  this  formal  acquaintance  with  the  books  re 
sults  in  an  appreciation  of  literature.  No  sense  of 
the  intimate  quality  of  a  writer  can  be  founded  on  a 
verbal  vacuum.  His  plots,  his  place  in  literature, 


1 68     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

his  central  motives,  and  the  opinion  of  his  critics 
could  all  be  just  as  adequately  conveyed,  if  his 
books  were  studied  in  the  language  of  the  deaf 
and  dumb.  Of  course,  one  may  be  drawn  to  an 
author  by  that  process  but  it  would  hardly  be  the 
artistic  attraction  of  literature;  it  is  as  if  one 
felt  drawn  to  a  woman  by  an  interest  exclusively 
in  her  bones.  Elementary  as  these  remarks  may 
seem  I  offer  them  to  Gallophiles  without  apology. 
On  the  contrary  I  rather  fear  that  I  am  writing, 
over  their  heads. 

Of  course  nobody  realizes  how  far  away  he  is, 
for  the  pursuit  of  the  French  language  in  this 
country  is  invariably  accompanied  by  the  belief 
that  it  has  been  overtaken.  One  hardly  ever  meets 
an  American  who  knows  any  French  at  all  who  is 
not  filled  with  a  strange  optimism  as  to  the  amount 
of  it,  for  the  learning  of  French  is  a  sort  of 
course  in  progressive  hallucination,  everybody  be 
lieving,  both  teacher  and  taught,  that  he  is  further 
along  than  he  is. 

I  have  heard  it  said  that  some  day  there  might 
be  such  a  change  in  the  system  of  teaching  as 
would  enable  a  careful  student,  after  seven  years, 
to  face  an  actual  French  person  without  stuttering, 
without  wild  and  groundless  laughter,  without 
agony  of  gesture,  and  without  gargling  his  throat. 
I  have  heard  reformers  say  that  the  American 
expert  in  the  French  language  really  must  be  saved 


A   GALLOMANIAC  169 

from  the  sort  of  embarrassments  he  now  under 
goes.  He  ought  not  to  be  obliged,  for  example, 
they  say,  to  leave  a  house  by  the  fire-escape  because 
he  cannot  ask  his  way  to  the  door;  or  to  be  served 
four  times  to  potatoes  because  he  cannot  say, 
"Je  n'en  veux  plus;  or  to  go  about  insulting  peo 
ple  whom  he  has  no  desire  to  insult;  or  to  use 
language  to  his  hostess  which  he  finds  afterward 
to  have  been  highly  obscene;  or  to  tell  a  story  in 
a  mystic  tongue,  known  only  to  himself,  com 
pounded  of  the  ruins  of  two  languages,  or  in  the 
deaf-and-dumb  alphabet  supplemented  by  gym 
nastic  feats,  or  in  words  so  far  apart  that  every 
body  in  the  room  listens  to  the  ticking  of  the  clock 
between  them. 

I  know  nothing  about  the  chance  of  future 
changes,  but  I  have  observed  very  often  the  pres 
ent  results;  and  I  will  reproduce  here  as  accurately 
as  I  can  the  table-talk  of  a  serious  and  by  no 
means  unintelligent  man,  a  finished  product  of  the 
present  system.  He  begins,  of  course,  almost  in 
variably  by  telling  the  French  person  that  sits  next 
to  him  that  he  is  a  woman  or  that  he  is  not  a 
woman.  He  will  then  say  that  he  is  in  the  rear 
because  a  long  time  ago  he  was  held  underneath 
the  city;  that  he  tilled  the  soil  of  his  office  slowly; 
that  he  did  not  jump  till  six  o'clock,  though  he 
usually  jumps  at  five;  that  he  likes  cats  and  oaks 
and  that  he  had  a  cat  and  an  oak  once  who  would 


I7Q    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

eat  in  the  cup  together;  that  his  aunt  had  a  cat 
who  killed  six  smiles  in  one  day;  that  he  had 
dropped  a  piece  of  bread  on  the  ceiling ;  that  it  is 
a  good  time  though  the  paper  promised  tears;  that 
he  swims  better  in  dirty  water  than  in  cool  because 
it  throws  him  up  in  the  air.  And  he  will  ask  for 
the  following  objects,  all  of  which  he  believes  can 
be  found  on  the  table  or  easily  obtained:  A  sad 
dle — he  wants  to  put  some  of  it  in  his  soup;  a 
hillside;  a  little  more  of  the  poison;  a  pear-tree; 
a  bass  wind  instrument  full  of  milk;  the  hide  of 
any  animal;  a  farmer's  daughter  of  shameless 
character;  and  a  portion  of  a  well-set,  thick,  short- 
backed  horse. 

Now  this  sort  of  thing  will  happen  not  only  to 
almost  any  student  under  the  present  system,  but 
to  the  majority  of  the  teachers  themselves,  and  as 
a  rule  they  do  not  know  that  it  is  happening. 
Many  Americans  will  talk  French  at  intervals  all 
through  their  lives  without  ever  finding  out  that 
they  are  not  saying  a  word  in  French;  so  great 
are  the  powers  of  divination  among  the  gifted 
people  with  whom  they  converse.  And  again  and 
again  you  will  see  persons  who  have  not  emerged 
from  the  condition  of  the  young  man  whose  con 
versation  I  have  quoted  chosen  as  French  teachers 
in  institutions  of  learning.  It  is  compatible  with 
present  standards  of  scholarship.  One  may  be 
have  in  this  manner  and  publish  an  intelligible 


A   GALLOMANIAC  171 

monograph  on  the  Felibrige.  One  may  curl  up  in 
some  corner  of  Romance  philology  where  he  will 
never  be  disturbed,  or  range  through  five  centuries 
of  French  literature,  putting  authors  in  their 
places,  or  make  those  unnecessary  remarks  beneath 
a  classic  text  which  constitute  the  essence  of  foot 
note  gentility;  in  short,  one  may  be  Teutonically 
efficient  all  around  and  about  the  French  language 
— over  it  and  under  it  and  behind  it — and  never 
once  be  in  it,  never  once  be  able  to  enter  into  the 
simplest  human  relation  with  any  one  who  uses  it. 
And  if  he  is  a  true  product  of  the  system  he 
will  be  perfectly  satisfied.  He  will  say  that  chat 
tering  with  French  people  is  only  a  pleasant  ac 
complishment,  after  all,  and  can  easily  be  acquired 
at  any  time  by  living  with  them ;  that  it  has  nothing 
in  common  with  the  aims  of  serious  scholarship; 
that  it  is  not  to  be  compared  in  importance  with 
the  ability  to  read  and  appreciate  books;  that 
there  is  no  room  for  it  in  the  present  system  and 
that  it  would  not  be  desirable  if  there  were.  He 
will  add  lightly  that  some  time  he  means  to  brush 
up  his  French  conversation.  He  will  say  this  with 
out  a  qualm,  without  a  trace  of  pity  for  the  peo 
ple  he  means  to  brush  it  on.  He  does  not  know 
that  an  American  brushing  his  French  in  a  room 
bears  the  same  relation  to  any  peaceful  conversa 
tion  that  may  be  going  on  in  it  at  the  time  as  is 
borne  by  a  carpet-sweeper  in  action.  He  does 


1721    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

not  know  that  an  American  when  brushing  his 
French  ought  to  be  kept  out  of  rooms.  He  does 
not  know  that  if  in  the  future  the  relations  be 
tween  this  country  and  France  should  unhappily 
become  strained  it  will  be  largely  due  to  Ameri 
cans  brushing  French.  The  system  not  only  with 
holds  from  us  the  means  of  understanding  the 
French  language;  it  encourages  us  to  misunder 
stand  it.  It  fills  us  with  the  assurance  that  we  are 
doing  easily  what  we  are  not  doing  at  all.  It 
seems  as  if  American  instruction  in  French  were 
designed  for  the  frustration  of  civilized  inter 
course. 

I  cannot  really  blame  that  French  lady  who, 
after  long  association  with  the  American  function 
aries  in  Paris  during  the  war,  pronounced  the 
opinion  that  at  their  best  Americans  are  children 
and  at  their  worst  they  are  brutes;  nor  can  I 
blame  the  Americans.  I  have  no  doubt  that  a 
large  part  of  the  unpleasantness  was  linguistic. 
It  is  probable  that  every  one  of  those  Americans 
was  trying  to  say  something  very  agreeable  to  the 
lady,  but  when  put  into  language  it  turned  out 
the  other  way.  It  is  probable  that  many  of  them 
cursed  the  lady  and  never  knew. 


CLASSIC  DEBATE 

In  one  of  those  good,  solid  British  papers, 
where,  time  out  of  mind,  correspondents  have 
flashed  Latin  quotations  at  the  editor,  or  written 
long  letters  on  "What  constitutes  a  gentleman?" 
they  were  still,  even  in  war-time,  debating  in  their 
usual  way,  the  question  of  the  classics,  and  they 
are  as  busy  with  it  as  ever  to-day. 

The  argument  on  each  side  is  always  very 
simple.  One  tells  you  that  with  Latin  and  Greek 
he  would  never  have  been  the  man  he  now  is. 
The  other  says  that  he  would  never  have  been 
the  man  he  now  is  without  them.  They  sometimes 
vary  it  by  saying  that  they  would  have  sooner  be 
come  the  men  they  now  are,  with  (or  without) 
the  classics.  Stripped  to  its  bare  bones,  the  debate 
seems  to  be  a  contest  between  self-satisfactions. 
Why  each  is  so  pleased  with  his  present  condition 
is  never  explained. 

Yet  that  is  obviously  of  the  first  importance. 
Who  cares  how  a  mind  was  nourished  if  he  can 
see  no  reason  why  he  should  place  any  value  on 
the  mind?  When  "Doctor  of  Divinity"  writes 
at  great  length  on  behalf  of  his  humanities,  he 

173 


174     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

does  not  appear  particularly  humane,  and  if 
"Biologist"  is  glad  to  be  without  any  humanities 
at  all,  there  is  nothing  about  "Biologist"  per 
sonally  that  tends  to  make  you  glad  as  well.  On 
the  contrary,  you  would  often  like  to  take  the 
classics  out  of  "Doctor  of  Divinity"  and  thrust 
them  into  "Biologist,"  just  by  way  of  shifting 
things  about  a  bit  on  the  chance  of  improving  the 
situation. 

"Philonous"  and  "Scientificus"  come  out  about 
even  in  dullness,  and  when  old  "Philomathicus" 
writes  from  Warwickshire  about  all  that  Vergil 
has  done  for  him,  everyone  with  a  grain  of  good 
taste  is  sorry  Vergil  did  it.  To  the  mind  of  an 
impartial  witness  it  always  ends  in  a  draw.  If 
they  did  not  brag  about  it,  you  could  no  more  tell 
which  of  them  had  had  the  classics  and  which  had 
not,  than  you  could  tell  which  was  vaccinated,  if 
they  did  not  roll  up  their  sleeves.  The  only  thing 
you  can  make  out  of  the  affair,  with  scientific  cer 
tainty,  is  that  in  every  case  either  the  education 
was  wrong  or  the  wrong  man  was  educated. 
And  that  must  be  precisely  the  impression  that  is 
left  on  any  anxious  British  parent  who  seriously 
observes  the  usual  culture  squabble  as  it  comes  out 
in  the  magazines.  He  must  long  to  save  the 
child  from  the  ultimate  fate  of  either  party  to  it. 
He  would  hate  in  after  life  to  have  the  child  ex* 
plode  like  the  gentleman  who  is  so  proud  of  his 


CLASSIC  DEBATE  175 

classic  contents;  he  would  hate  to  see  the  child 
some  day  cave  in  like  the  gentleman  who  is  so 
proud  to  be  without  them.  For  that  unsatisfac 
tory  termination  is  almost  the  rule  in  these  violent 
culture  contests.  Each  combatant  before  he  can 
reach  his  adversary  seems  to  go  to  pieces  all  by 
himself.  Never  by  any  chance  does  one  kill  the 
other,  though  you  would  suppose  on  the  first  in 
spection  of  each  one  of  them  that  nothing  could 
be  easier  to  do. 

It  is  the  same  way  with  the  discussion  of  the 
question  in  this  country  though  it  is  here  more 
likely  to  turn  on  considerations  of  practical  utility. 
The  practical  utility  argument,  for  or  against  the 
study  of  Latin  and  Greek,  seems  to  me  to  break 
down  for  the  same  reason  that  the  German  effi 
ciency  argument  broke  down  during  the  war. 
That  is  to  say,  it  does  not  take  into  consideration 
the  imponderables.  From  a  good  many  articles 
setting  forth  to  what  extent  Latin  and  Greek  have 
helped  or  hindered  the  respective  writers  in  their 
careers  it  would  appear  that  the  only  test  that 
they  apply  is  that  of  contemporary  social  im 
portance. 

If  I  were  to  say,  for  example,  that  but  for 
my  firm  grasp  at  the  age  of  twelve  on  the  exact 
difference  between  the  gerund  and  the  gerundive, 
I  should  not  have  risen  to  what  I  have  risen  to, 
it  would  not  be  accounted  an  argument  for  the 


176     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

classics,  but  rather  as  a  warning  against  them. 
People  would  look  me  up  and  find  that  I  had  not 
risen  to  anything. 

But  if  I  should  stand  splendidly  forth  as  presi 
dent  of  the  All-Columbian  Amalgamated  Boot  and 
Shoe  Concern  and  attribute  my  well-known  or 
ganizing  talent  to  the  mastery  at  an  early  age  of 
Xenophon's  Anabasis,  there  would  be  instant 
cheering  in  the  classical  ranks;  whereas  if  I  said 
that  had  it  not  been  for  Xenophon's  Anabasis,  I 
should  have  got  ahead  much  faster,  should,  in  fact, 
have  fairy  whizzed  into  my  presidency  of  the  shoe 
business,  shouts  of  triumph  would  at  once  ascend 
from  the  Modern  School. 

There  you  have  the  sort  of  test  that  is  regarded 
as  really  practical — what  the  classics  actually  did 
to  some  large,  perfectly  substantial  and  hard- 
headed  shoe  man.  It  is  a  test  much  valued  in  this 
debate. 

If  I  were  a  classical  scholar  I  would  not  rest 
my  case  on  these  arguments  from  practical  life, 
as  the  term  practical  is  understood  in  these  dis 
cussions.  It  may  be  gratifying  if  one  can  cite  a 
dozen  bank  presidents  who  approve  of  Latin  and 
Greek,  but  it  is  a  short-lived  pleasure.  Some  one 
is  soon  citing  two  dozen  who  disapprove  of  them. 
I  have  just  finished  reading  the  fifteenth  article 
published  within  the  last  two  years,  which  pro 
ceeds  on  the  same  assumption  in  respect  to  a  prac- 


CLASSIC  DEBATE  177 

tical  life.  The  writer  rounds  up  in  defense  of  the 
classics  a  considerable  number  of  the  politically, 
commercially,  and  scientifically  successful  persons 
of  the  moment.  There  are  one  President,  two 
ex-Presidents,  two  Secretaries  of  State,  and  a 
handsome  showing  of  administrators,  bankers, 
heads  of  trust  and  insurance  companies,  engineers, 
mathematicians,  electricians,  economists,  botanists, 
zoologists,  psychologists,  physicists,  and  chemists. 
This  may  have  been  a  more  bountiful  and  seduc 
tive  list  than  any  anti-classical  man  had  produced 
at  that  moment,  but  it  is  not  a  more  bountiful  one 
than  he  could  produce,  if  you  gave  him  time.  It 
contains  fifty  professors  of  science,  both  pure  and 
applied.  The  man  who  could  not  within  a  week 
produce  fifty-five  on  the  other  side  would  not  be 
worth  his  salt  as  an  anti-classical  debater.  Then 
the  unfortunate  writer  of  the  first  article  would 
have  to  find  five  more,  and  thus  the  debate  would 
resolve  itself  into  a  mad  competitive  scramble  for 
botanists,  engineers,  business  men,  and  the  like, 
to  which,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  there  would  be  no 
logical  conclusion  till  they  had  all  been  caught  and 
tabulated.  And  after  this  was  all  done,  we  should 
be  just  where  we  were  when  we  started.  For  the 
success  of  these  successful  persons  is  not  a  sue- 
csful  test. 

If  the  majority  of  them  knew,  what  they  never 
could  know — that  is  to  say  that  they  presided, 


1 7  81    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

banked,  administered,  engineered,  insured,  botan 
ized,  and  psychologized  no  better  for  their  study 
of  the  classics,  the  question  of  the  classics  would 
still  be  as  open  as  before.  As  human  beings  they 
were  probably  engaged  during  a  considerable 
portion  of  their  lives  in  doing  other  things  than 
climbing  into  presidencies  or  directng  banks  or 
building  bridges  or  organizing  other  human 
beings.  If  not,  they  were  forlorn  creatures  whom 
it  is  not  desirable  to  reproduce.  As  human  beings 
their  leisure  was  probably  a  matter  of  some  prac 
tical  concern  to  them.  Statistics  of  success  cannot 
decide  a  question  that  pertains  to  their  personal 
leisure.  I  doubt  if  statistics  of  success  can  decide 
any  question  at  all,  when  the  standard  of  success 
is  the  vague,  unstable,  arbitrary  thing  implied  in 
these  discussions.  Nobody  wants  his  own  life 
regulated  by  the  way  a  chance  majority  of  these 
successful  persons  happen  to  feel  about  theirs. 
Still  less  would  he  want  his  children  to  be  brought 
up  only  to  resemble  them.  Every  plain  person 
realizes  that  there  is  a  vast  domain  of  thought, 
feeling,  and  activity,  including  religion,  music, 
poetry,  painting,  sport,  dancing,  among  many 
other  things  that  subsists  quite  independently  of 
the  good  or  bad  opinions  of  any  motley  group  of 
persons  picked  out  by  educators  as  successful  at 
this  day. 

When  they  tell  you  that  some  railway  manager 


CLASSIC  DEBATE  179 

thinks  that  Latin  has  helped  him  in  his  labors  and 
that  he  still  reads  Horace  for  pleasure,  they  are 
telling  you  nothing  either  for  or  against  the  study 
of  Latin.  Prove  that  the  study  of  Latin  and 
Greek  so  sapped  a  man's  vitality  that  he  lost  five 
years  in  getting  to  the  top  of  his  gas  company,  and 
you  have  really  proved  nothing  against  it.  Prove 
that  the  extraordinary  mental  energy  acquired  by 
the  perusal  of  Hoedus  stans  in  tecto  domus  lupum 
vidit  praetereuntem  shot  him  into  the  United 
States  Senate  at  thirty^six  and  you  have  not  said 
one  word  in  its  favor.  This  seems  fairly  obvious, 
but  the  contrary  assumption  underlies  a  vast  area 
of  educational  printed  matter  on  the  subject — all 
based  on  a  standard  of  momentary  success,  that 
is  to  say,  a  standard  of  momentary  public  toler 
ation. 

Yet  even  an  educator  would  not  be  any  more 
eager  to  have  his  daughter  learn  to  dance,  if  he 
knew  that  the  chief  justice  of  the  Supreme  Court 
had  danced  regularly  all  through  his  career  for 
its  beneficial  effects  upon  his  profession,  and  was 
now  dancing  almost  every  moment  of  the  day  just 
for  the  pleasure  of  it.  He  does  not  want  the 
doings  of  the  chief  justice  to  mould  his  daughter's 
life  in  all  particulars.  He  probably  would  just  as 
lief  she  did  not  resemble  in  many  ways  that  un 
doubtedly  respectable  person. 

And  the  question  of  the  classics  is  in  this  outside 


i8o     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

domain,  whatever  their  casual  relation  may  be  to 
a  random  group  of  professional,  business,  and 
scientific  activities.  It  is  true,  for  example,  that 
the  best  poetry  in  the  English  or  any  other  lan 
guage  is  detested  by  the  one  thousand  ablest 
executives  in  this  country  at  this  moment.  But 
that  is  not  supposed,  even  among  educators,  to 
have  any  relevance  to  the  question  of  its  value. 
Even  in  the  wildest  educational  articles  of  the 
month,  you  do  not  find  this  fact  advanced  as  a 
conclusive  argument  from  practical  life  for  the 
promotion  of  the  detestation  of  poetry.  Nobody 
takes  the  child  aside  and  says:  "Hate  poetry  and 
up  you  go  to  the  very  top  of  the  drygoods 
business." 

These  arguments  assume  that  any  influence  was 
harmful  if  it  delayed  these  not  very  interesting 
persons  in  blossoming  into  the  sort  of  beings  they 
afterwards  became.  From  reading  the  testimony 
of  these  persons  it  is  impossible  to  discern  any 
reason  for  that  belief.  Each  one  implies  that  if 
he  had  had  his  way,  he  would  have  become  the 
man  he  is  much  sooner.  But  how  does  he  know 
that  he  did  not  become  the  man  he  is  too  soon? 
Writers  on  the  subject  find  an  argument  for  a 
course  of  study  in  the  mere  fact  that  it  has 
speeded  miscellaneous  successful  persons  along 
the  way  they  went  toward  the  places  where  you 
happen  to  find  them,  when  so  far  as  any  sensible 


CLASSIC  DEBATE  181 

man  can  see,  they  might  just  as  well  be  somewhere 
else. 

But  perhaps  educators  do  not  really  attach  any 
importance  to  this  nonsense.  They  are,  no  doubt, 
more  sensible  than  they  seem.  There  is  no  use  in 
taking  the  malign  view  of  educators  that  their 
personalties  resemble  their  usual  educational  arti 
cles.  They  probably  do  not  believe  any  more 
than  I  do  in  a  neat  hierarchy  of  success  with  the 
better  man  always  a  peg  above  the  worse  one,  or 
that  if  you  skim  the  cream  of  contemporary  cele- 
brites  you  will  have  a  collection  of  more  practical 
lives  than  if  you  had  taken  the  next  layer  or  the 
layer  below  that.  Practical  lives,  as  led  in  Ger 
many  during  the  last  forty  years  or  so,  must  begin 
to  seem  to  them  now  somewhat  visionary.  And 
they  can  hardly  retain  a  sublime  confidence  in  the 
standards  of  success  of  their  own  generation, 
which,  though  equipped  with  the  very  latest 
modern  efficiency  tests  and  appliances,  neverthe 
less  reverted  overnight  almost  to  a  state  of  can 
nibalism.  They  probably  would  admit  that  in 
stead  of  compelling  the  next  generation  to  re 
semble  the  sort  of  persons  that  society  has  often 
permitted  to  become  uppermost  in  this,  it  might 
be  only  humane  to  give  it  a  fair  chance  of  not 
resembling  them.  When  you  read  the  language 
of  educational  disputes  tradition  begins  to  seem  a 
reasonable  thing.  Educational  debaters  argue 


1 8  21    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

with  an  air  of  mathematical  certainty,  as  if  work 
ing  out  an  equation,  and  then  produce  a  solution 
containing  such  hopelessly  unknown  quantities  as 
the  value  of  the  opinion  of  fifty-seven  more  or 
less  accidentally  important  persons  as  to  the  sort 
of  lives  all  the  rest  of  the  world  should  live. 

Of  course,  these  speed  tests  of  education  ap 
plied  to  public  careers  are  unconvincing,  simply 
because  the  larger  part  of  life  does  not  consist  in 
publicly  careering.  And  distrust  of  the  middle- 
aged  successful  man  on  the  subject  of  his  own  edu 
cation  is  justified,  because  he  is  an  instinctive 
partisan  of  his  own  success.  It  would  be  a  cruel 
thing  to  entrust  writers  on  education  with  their 
own  education.  If  they  had  been  brought  up  on 
their  own  writings  many  of  them  would  never 
have  pulled  through. 

Take  for  instance,  the  illustrious  case  of  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw.  Mr.  Shaw  favored  a  system  of 
education  which  began  by  abolishing  almost  every 
thing  and  which  would  certainly  have  resulted  in 
abolishing  Mr.  Shaw.  It  was  a  good,  clean,  con 
sistent  sweep  of  every  tradition.  It  abolished 
homes,  marriage,  fathers,  mothers,  schools,  rules, 
text-books,  settled  residence,  settled  convictions, 
moral,  social  and  religious  preconceptions  or  con 
trols;  it  rid  the  child  of  family  ties,  personal  affec 
tions,  local  customs  and  every  other  narrowing 
influence,  and  turned  him  out  to  roam  and  learn 


CLASSIC  DEBATE  183 

and  so  have  a  chance  of  free  development;  every 
body's  children  to  be  brought  up  by  everybody 
else,  and  thus  escape  the  danger  of  spoiling  and 
all  to  be  kept  in  constant  motion  all  over  the 
British  Isles  lest  they  contract  a  local  prejudice — 
each  to  be  perfectly  free  in  all  respects  except  that 
he  must  not  entertain  a  settled  principle  or  meet  a 
relative. 

Now  I  do  not  criticize  this  system,  nor  do  I 
deny  that  it  may  be  just  as  sensible  as  the  ideas 
of  modern  educational  writers  generally.  But  I 
do  contend  that  if  Mr.  Shaw  had  been  brought 
up  under  it  the  modern  English  and  American 
stage  would  have  lost  its  brightest  light.  He 
curses  all  restraints  on  his  development.  I  am 
grateful  to  them,  for  I  am  quite  sure  they  saved 
his  life.  A  Shaw  more  Shavian  than  he  actually 
became  would  have  been  hanged  at  the  age  of 
twenty. 

And  I  should  take  tradition  rather  than  the  word 
of  Mr.  G.  H.  Wells  in  those  two  novels  of  his 
on  the  subject  of  education.  I  believe  the  classical 
tradition  had  more  to  do  with  the  making  of  Mr. 
H.  G.  Wells  than  any  treatise  on  biology  that  he 
ever  read.  Mr.  Wells  has  more  in  common  with 
Plato  than  he  has  with  Herbert  Spencer,  and  it 
is  because  he  writes  more  in  the  style  of  the 
Phasdo  than  he  does  in  the  style  of  The  Principles 
of  Sociology  that  we  read  him.  If  Mr.  Wells  con- 


1 84    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

siders  Plato  a  dull  old  fool,  as  he  probably  does, 
that  has  nothing  to  do  with  it.  He  has  absorbed 
since  his  nativity  a  literature  that  has  been  steeped 
for  many  centuries  in  the  writings  of  these  old 
fogies  he  despises.  In  a  sense  they  own  him,  so 
far  as  there  is  anything  in  him  that  is  worth  per 
manently  possessing.  Mr.  Wells  is  essentially  a 
very  ancient  person,  but,  being  incapable  of  self- 
inspection,  he  does  not  know  how  he  came  by  a 
large  part  of  his  incentives  and  suggestions.  That 
is  why  he  has  so  often  moved  in  circles  rediscover 
ing  old  thoughts  that  antedate  the  Christian  era, 
and  thinking  they  were  new.  If  an  archeologist 
examined  Mr.  Wells,  he  would  find  him  full  of 
the  ruins  of  ancient  Rome,  and  he  is  much  the 
brisker  writer  for  containing  them.  Nobody 
would  be  reading  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  to-day  if  he 
were  a  mere  product  of  contemporary  science.  If 
he  could  have  applied  his  theory  of  education  to 
his  own  bringing-up  he  would  have  committed 
literary  suicide. 

I  mention  these  writers  as  the  most  conspicuous 
examples  of  failure  to  take  into  account  the  im 
ponderables.  I  believe  that  it  is  these  imponder 
ables  which  account  in  a  large  measure  for  any 
thing  in  them  that  is  likely  to  prove  to  be  perma 
nent;  in  short  that  they  are  the  product  of  the 
humanism  that  they  disown.  I  believe  that  so  far 
as  they  or  any  other  exceptional  living  writers  are 


CLASSIC  DEBATE  185 

in  a  permanent  sense  lively,  they  are  in  reality 
dancing  to  tunes  played  by  persons  who  died  be 
fore  the  Christian  era. 

A  better  instance  than  either  of  these  typical 
contemporaries  is  that  of  one  of  their  immediate 
ancestors.  Samuel  Butler  in  "The  Way  of  All 
Flesh"  is  almost  as  ferocious  toward  Latin  and 
Greek  as  he  is  toward  fathers  and  mothers.  He 
suggests  no  substitute  for  Latin  or  Greek  any 
more  than  he  suggests  a  substitute  for  fathers  and 
mothers,  but  he  implies  that  all  four  should  be 
abandoned  instantly  on  the  chance  that  substitutes 
may  turn  up.  Now  I  know  that  the  radicalism 
of  Samuel  Butler  in  respect  to  these  and  other 
matters  is  what  mainly  interests  the  modern  com 
mentator.  But  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  his  per 
manent  interest.  Dozens  of  more  radical  writers 
may  be  found  everywhere  who  are  exceedingly 
dull.  The  value  of  "The  Way  of  All  Flesh'.'  is  in 
its  texture — the  weaving  together  of  a  thousand 
small  things — and  not  in  a  few  large,  central 
thoughts.  Essentially  it  is  in  the  best  tradition  of 
the  English  novel.  Also  it  is  hopelessly  entangled 
with  the  classics.  He  had  to  make  his  hero  take 
honors  in  them  at  the  university  in  order  to  get 
the  muscle  to  attack  them.  He  is  a  prize-fighter 
who  knocks  out  his  own  boxing-masters  in  his  in 
dignation  at  having  learned  nothing  from  them. 

But  I  suppose  the  arguments  I  have  been  quot- 


1 8 6     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

ing  are  merely  the  little  missiles  of  debate.  I 
doubt  if  any  one  really  thinks  it  is  a  matter  to  be 
settled  by  the  points  at  which  persons  happen  to 
be  perching  in  society  at  the  present  moment.  I 
suppose  these  writers  would  admit  that  the  classics 
are  not  and  never  have  been  chiefly  valuable  as 
the  means  of  success.  They  are  obviously  valued 
as  the  means  of  escaping  its  consequences.  They 
are  not  esteemed  for  getting  one  on  in  the  modern 
world,  but  for  getting  one  pleasantly  out  of  it — 
that  is  to  say  for  the  exactly  opposite  reason  to 
that  which  social  statistics,  psychological  measure 
ments  of  mental  growth,  testimony  of  engineers, 
educational  specialists,  chemists  and  bank  directors 
always  emphasize. 

Men  turn  to  the  classics  in  the  hope  of  meeting 
precisely  the  sort  of  people  who  would  not  write 
these  articles  on  the  classics.  Men  turn  to  the 
classics  to  escape  from  their  contemporaries.  Cur 
rent  arguments  do  not  affect  the  central  point, 
namely  the  wisdom  of  breaking  with  a  tradition 
that  has  bound  together  the  literatures  of  the 
world  for  twenty  centuries  and  has  vivified  a  large 
proportion  of  the  greatest  authors  in  our  own. 

'But  I  do  not  believe  that  any  muddle  of  present- 
day  educational  policy  can  do  any  lasting  damage. 
Suppose  it  goes  from  bad  to  worse.  Suppose  after 
ceasing  to  be  required,  the  study  of  Latin  and 
Greek  ceases  even  to  be  admitted.  Suppose  this 


CLASSIC  DEBATE  187 

is  followed  by  another  plunge  of  progress  that 
would  dazzle  even  Mr.  Wells  and  a  mere  parsing 
acquaintance  with  a  Latin  author  is  regarded  as 
not  merely  frivolous,  or  eccentric,  like  fox-trotting 
or  button-  collecting,  but  as  downright  heinous, 
like  beer-drinking  in  the  teeth  of  a  Prohibition 
gale. 

Imagine  even  graver  changes — imagine  the  era 
of  scientific  barbarism  dawning  in  1925  as  the  un 
scientific  era  of  barbarism  dawned  in  476  and 
Soviets  set  up  everywhere  in  America,  and  paper 
scarce  as  everything  would  be  under  Bolshevism, 
and  Latin  and  Greek  books  turned  again  into 
palimpsets  and  obliterated  and  replaced  with 
strange  dark  Bolshevik  texts  presumably  all  writ 
ten  in  the  Yiddish  language.  Nevertheless,  at  the 
blackest  moment  of  black  Bolshevism  they  would 
still  be  read  just  as  they  were  still  read  at  the  very 
darkest  moment  of  the  ages  which  we  call  dark. 

The  Bolshevists  could  be  no  worse  for  them 
than  were  the  German  tribes.  Here  and  there 
half-human  Bolhevists  would  preserve  a  text  just 
as  here  and  there  the  less  fanatical  monks  did, 
and  there  would  be  a  vast  deal  of  subterranean 
scholarship  at  work,  all  the  keener  on  account  of 
persecution.  Probably  Bolshevist  suppression 
would  do  no  more  harm  than  the  teaching  of 
American  Germanized  college  professors  did  dur 
ing  the  last  generation.  In  fact,  it  might  actually 


1 8 8!    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

be  a  great  deal  better  if  we  were  to  persecute  the 
classics  than  to  teach  them  as  we  do.  When 
you  read  the  notes  in  the  usual  school  Vergil, 
simple  illiteracy  takes  on  a  certain  charm. 

Make  Latin  and  Greek  illegal,  and  caves  in  the 
mountains  will  gradually  fill  up  with  refugees  bear 
ing  dictionaries — refugees  from  the  great  sprawl 
ing  documentary  modern  novel,  from  modern 
philosophies  gone  stale  in  ten  years,  from  new 
thoughts  better  expressed  twenty-four  hundred 
years  ago,  from  the  yearly  splash  of  new  poets 
swimming  along  in  schools,  from  religions  of 
good  digestion,  competitions  for  public  astonish 
ment,  the  shapeless  solemnity  of  presidential  mes 
sages  and  serious  magazines,  in  short,  from  all  the 
incoherency  and  formlessness  of  the  tremendous 
opinions  of  the  too  familiar  present  moment  which 
somehow  for  the  life  of  him  nobody  can  manage 
to  remember  the  next  moment.  It  may  not  be  a 
bad  experiment.  It  will  inevitably  be  followed  by 
a  renaissance. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS 

An  Englishman's  burdens  are  hard  enough  to 
bear  without  a  London  writer's  insisting  that  from 
this  time  on  he  shall  expand  into  "warmth  and 
cordiality"  at  the  first  meeting  with  a  stranger; 
and  the  writer,  though  right  in  'his  view  of  the 
importance  of  Anglo-American  goodwill,  is  wrong 
in  saying  that  the  chill  of  the  British  introduction 
causes  suffering  in  this  country.  The  grimness 
of  that  first  moment  has  already  become  tradi 
tional  and  it  is  now  expected  by  every  people  in 
the  world.  There  is  no  hardship  in  the  long 
silence  and  the  leaden  eye  when  you  are  prepared 
for  them  and  know  they  mean  no  harm.  On  the 
other  hand  an  encounter  with  a  suddenly  expand 
ing  Englishman  would  be  shocking,  in  its  sharp 
reversal  of  all  precedents.  There  is  no  reason 
why  the  Englishman,  like  other  solids,  should  not 
have  his  melting  point.  If  he  unbent  on  first 
acquaintance,  he  would  seem  like  a  ramrod  that 
melted  in  the  sun.  .Smile  after  the  first  handshake, 
says  this  writer,  and  be  natural — as  if  anything 
could  be  less  natural  to  a  well-bred  Englishman, 
than  any  such  wild  social  turbulence.  No  one  ex- 


1 90    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

pects  warmth  from  him  out  of  hand  any  more 
than  one  expects  a  hen  to  lay  a  soft-boiled  egg 
for  him;  and  a  wise  man  will  blame  the  one  no 
more  than  the  other.  After  all,  why  is  their  way 
worse  than  ours?  There  is  no  greater  hardship 
in  having  to  dig  conversation  out  of  an  English 
man  than  in  having  to  dig  yourself  out  of  the  con 
versation  of  your  fellow  citizens. 

But  there  does  seem  to  be  a  misunderstanding 
between  those  two  small  classes  in  the  two  coun 
tries  who  are  mainly  concerned  with  the  outward 
gentilities.  And  in  regard  to  the  true  nature  of 
snobbery,  they  are  certainly  at  odds.  I  think  our 
side  has  the  right  of  it — my  patriotic  bias,  perhaps. 

"How  the  Americans  do  love  a  Duke!"  is  a 
frequent  comment  in  certain  British  journals,  and 
they  then  proceed  to  the  sober  generalization  that 
uthe  United  States  is  a  nation  of  flunkies  and  of 
snobs."  Whoever  will  be  at  the  pains  to  follow 
British  weekly  journalism  will  find  this  sentiment 
repeated  every  little  while.  He  will  observe 
among  this  class  of  writers  that  vulgarity  is  a 
matter  of  geography,  being  reckoned  from  Pall 
Mall  as  time  is  from  Greenwich. 

Now  as  to  snobs,  New  York's  streets  are  of 
course  often  choked  with  them.  A  duke,  an 
elephant,  a  base-ball  pitcher  on  Fifth  Avenue, 
may  at  any  time  be  the  center  of  a  disproportion 
ate  and  servile  attention  from  both  the  American 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS     191 

people  and  the  press.  Yet  the  cult  of  the  egreg 
ious  and  the  greatly  advertised  has  never  the  deep 
devotion  of  sound  snobbery. 

Take  the  American  newspaper  view  of  "so 
ciety,"  for  example.  You  would  certainly  have  to 
call  that  snobbery.  A  friend  of  mine  once  became 
quite  indignant  on  the  subject  and  wrote  about  it 
bitterly.  According  to  the  newspapers,  said  he, 
all  the  blessings  and  misfortunes  of  life  fall  only 
on  people  who  are  "in  society."  He  wanted  to 
know  why  in  Heaven's  name  they  print  such 
"arrant  nonsense,"  and  he  asked,  "If  we  are  not 
all  snobs,  why  try  so  hard  to  make  us  so?" 

Now  of  course  this  country  is  full  of  climbers. 
No  one  here  is  content  with  that  station  in  life 
to  which  it  has  pleased  God  to  call  him;  and  if 
he  were,  some  female  relative  would  surely  push 
him  along.  And  since  we  are  all  trying  to  "get 
on,"  with  a  pretty  fair  chance  of  it,  for  our  dullest 
people  are  always  at  the  top,  it  is  not  strange  that 
we  should  value  all  the  little  symbols  of  on-getting, 
and  being  "in  society"  is  one  of  them.  What  if 
"society"  does  stretch  as  far  as  the  wives  of  six 
plumbers  at  a  luncheon?  What  if  the  term  itself 
fades  into  a  mere  newspaper  gesture  or  habit 
and  a  society  reporter  at  a  scene  of  South  African 
carnage  would  probably,  by  mere  reflex  action, 
write,  "Hottentot  Society  Girl  Spears  Five?" 
That  does  not  turn  readers  into  snobs.  On  the 


192,     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

contrary,  it  confuses  the  snobbery  they  had  before, 
and  leaves  them  without  a  social  chart  or  compass. 
A  snob  cannot  tell  from  an  American  newspaper 
what  to  be  snobbish  about.  The  acreage  of  our 
newspaper  snobbery  is  of  course  enormous.  Even 
England,  the  Sinai  of  top-hat  commandments,  land 
of  Turveydrop,  George  Osborne,  and  Sir  Wil- 
loughby  Patterne,  England  itself  shows  not  so 
wide  and  foolish  an  expanse  of  newspaper  snob 
bery.  But  the  true  measure  of  snobbery  is  not 
in  area,  but  in  depth.  At  the  bottom  of  a  true 
snob  his  snobbery  is  united  with  his  religion.  Re 
spectable  British  papers  do  not,  like  our  own,  mix 
up  all  sorts  of  people  under  "society"  and  chatter 
about  them  every  day;  to  them  it  is  a  real  thing 
and  holy.  Our  papers  confound  snobbery;  theirs 
treat  it  with  respect.  Try  as  we  will,  we  cannot 
really  tell  who's  who;  we  know  that  we  are  guess 
ing.  At  the  root  of  American  snobbery  is  the 
cruel  canker  of  distrust.  "Society,"  as  an  Ameri 
can  newspaper  concept,  includes  any  member  of 
the  Caucasian  race  not  necessarily  rich  or  even 
well-to-do,  but  better  off  than  somebody  else  some 
where.  If  interest  in  it  is  snobbish,  it  is  one  of 
the  broadest,  least  invidious  forms  of  snobbishness 
ever  known,  approximating,  one  might  say,  a 
pretty  general  brotherly  love;  for  it  draws  the 
mind  to  a  Harlem  sociable,  and  attracts  the  human 
soul  to  the  strange,  wild  doings  of  Aldermen's 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS     193 

wives  at  their  tea-tables  in  Brooklyn,  probably 
clad  in  goatskins. 

It  is  not  for  an  upstart  and  volatile  people  to 
dispute  the  calm  supremacy  of  authentic  snobbery. 
Your  true  snob  is  not  inquisitive  at  all,  for  he  has 
no  sense  of  any  social  values  not  his  own.  He 
does  not  flourish  in  a  sprawling  and  chaotic  con 
tinent.  It  is  among  the  tightly  closed  minds  of 
tight  little  islands  that  he  is  seen  at  his  best.  Our 
snobbery  is  not  a  sturdy  plant,  for  its  vigor  is 
sapped  by  that  social  uncertainty  at  the  root  of 
it;  and  what  is  taken  for  it  here  usually  springs 
from  quite  alien  qualities — curiosity,  a  vast  social 
innocence,  and  a  blessed  inexperience  of  rank. 
To  be  sure,  if  King  George  came  to  New  York 
some  one  might  clip  his  coat-tails  for  a  keepsake; 
and  it  is  quite  probably  that  Mrs.  Van  Allendale, 
of  Newport,  if  asked  to  meet  him,  would  be  all 
of  a  tremble  whether  to  address  him  as  "Sire"  or 
"My  God."  But  what  has  this  in  common  with 
the  huge  assurances  of  true  snobbery — its  enorm 
ous  certainty  of  the  Proper  Thing,  in  clothes,  peo 
ple,  religion,  sports,  manners,  and  races,  and  its 
indomitable  determination  not  to  guess  again? 

I  wish  I  could  do  justice  to  the  type  of  British 
literary  journalism  in  which  this  sort  of  thing  ap 
pears.  I  have  tried  many  times  in  the  twenty  years 
of  my  observation  but  never  to  my  satisfaction. 
I  suppose  it  will  do  no  harm  to  try  again.  I  shall 


i94    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

have  to  typify  it  under  the  imaginary  title  of  The 
Gentleman's  Review,  because  to  pick  out  a  single 
one  of  the  several  competitors  would  be  invidious. 
The  essential  point  of  The  Gentleman's  Review 
is  that  it  is  written  by  persons  of  the  better  sort 
for  persons  of  the  better  sort.  And  not  only 
must  the  writer  be  a  better  sort  of  person;  he 
must  constantly  say  that  he  is  a  better  sort  of 
person,  and  for  pages  at  a  time  he  must  say  noth 
ing  else.  I  have  read  long  articles  which  when 
boiled  down  told  the  reader  nothing  else.  I  have 
read  articles  on  socialism,  patriotism,  labor  pro 
grammes,  poetry,  the  vulgarity  of  America  and 
of  the  Antipodes,  and  on  divers  other  subjects 
which  did  literally  tell  nothing  else  to  the  socialist, 
laborer,  poet,  or  American  or  Antipodean  outcast 
who  read  them.  The  gentility  of  the  writers  is 
never  merely  suggested;  it  is  announced,  and 
usually  in  terms  of  severity.  A  coal-heaver  read 
ing  The  Gentleman's  Review  would  be  informed 
in  words  of  unsparing  cruelty  that  he  is  low.  In 
deed,  it  seems  the  main  purpose — at  times  the  only 
purpose — for  which  the  Review  exists — to  tell 
coal-heavers  and  other  outside  creatures  that  they 
are  low.  And  by  outside  creatures  I  mean  almost 
everybody.  I  mean  not  only  all  Americans,  all 
Canadians,  and  other  inhabitants  of  a  hemisphere 
which,  to  say  the  least,  is  in  the  worst  possible  taste 
as  a  hemisphere,  besides  being  notoriously  ex- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS     195 

ternal  to  the  British  Isles.  I  mean  almost  every 
body  in  the  right  kind  of  hemisphere.  I  mean 
almost  everybody  in  the  British  Isles,  or  even  on 
the  better  streets  of  London.  Only  a  handful  of 
people  can  read  the  typical  article  of  The  Gentle 
man's  Review  without  feeling  that  they  are  at 
the  bottom  of  a  social  precipice. 

The  ideal  of  the  true-born  Gentleman's  Re 
viewer  is  not  only  social  exclusiveness,  but  mental 
exclusiveness.  He  does  not  argue  against  an  idea 
of  which  he  disapproves;  he  shows  that  idea  to 
the  door.  In  a  long  paper  on  some  form  of 
radicalism  he  will  say  at  the  start  that  he  must 
really  refuse  to  speak  of  radicalism.  The  right 
sort  of  people  do  not  speak  of  radicalism.  They 
have  dismissed  it  from  their  minds.  And  he  de 
votes  his  paper  to  developing  the  single  point  that 
the  only  way  to  deal  with  radicals  is  to  expunge 
them  from  your  list  of  acquaintances  the  moment 
you  find  out  that  they  are  radicals,  and  thereafter 
not  to  say  a  single  word  to  them  beyond  conveying 
the  bare  information  that  they  have  been  expunged. 
I  recall  just  such  a  paper  as  this,  and  I  recall  the 
impression  it  made  on  seven  extremely  dignified 
persons  whose  successive  letters  to  the  editor,  all 
dated  from  respectable  London  clubs,  declared 
that  in  the  opinion  of  the  writers  the  danger  of 
radicalism  could  not  be  averted  in  any  other  way: 
Gentlemen  must  dismiss  radicals  from  their  com- 


196    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

pany  just  as  they  had  dismissed  radicalism  from 
their  minds.  That  done,  radicalism  would  perish. 
A  writer  on  a  Labor-party  programme  in  The 
Gentleman's  Review  would  no  more  think  of  meet 
ing  the  arguments  for  the  Labor-party  programme 
than  he  would  think  of  meeting  the  laboring-man 
himself.  Why  bother  to  prove  a  Labor-party 
programme  unsound  in  face  of  the  towering  ab 
surdity  that  there  should  be  such  a  thing  as  a 
Labor  party  and  that  it  should  have  such  a  thing 
as  a  programme?  There  are  social  certitudes 
that  gentlemen  do  not  discuss.  When  Labor  raises 
a  question,  the  Gentleman's  Reviewer,  if  he  is  true 
to  type,  will  simply  raise  an  eyebrow.  When 
woman's  progress  was  blackening  the  sky,  I  read 
dozens  of  article  in  The  Gentleman's  Review  on 
woman's  suffrage  from  which  I  am  sure  no  reader 
could  make  out  anything  whatever  except  that  a 
shudder  was  running  through  some  gentlemanly 
frames.  At  the  threat  of  a  revolt  of  the  working- 
class  some  time  ago,  The  Gentleman's  Review 
became  speechless  almost  immediately  as  to  the 
nature  of  the  revolt.  It  could  only  say  that  some 
labor  leader  had  been  impolite  to  a  member  of 
the  upper  class,  and  that  it  feared  the  lower 
classes  might,  if  they  kept  on  in  their  present 
courses,  become  impolite  to  the  upper  ones.  The 
thought  of  other  perils  more  horrible  than  that 
shocked  it  to  silence.  But  perhaps  it  could  not 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS     197 

think  of  other  things  more  horrible  than  that. 
There  are  things  in  this  world  that  minds  of  this 
gentlemanly  quality  really  must  decline  to  meet. 
They  are  most  of  the  things  in  this  world. 

It  is  at  its  best  in  rebuking  other  people's  man 
ners  while  unconsciously  displaying  its  own.  Take 
American  manners,  for  instance.  Forty  years  ago 
it  was  saying  we  were  rude  because  we  were  young. 
It  is  still  saying  so.  "Centuries  of  polite  interna 
tional  tradition'1 — we  are  to  understand  that  it 
took  at  least  that  much  to  make  a  Gentleman's  Re 
viewer — are  not  behind  us  Americans.  "Instinc 
tive  delicacy  and  sympathy  with  the  feelings  of 
others" — such  as  is  displayed  in  the  pages  of  the 
Review — "are  not  commonly  possessed  by  the 
very  young" — meaning,  of  course,  possessed  by 
Americans.  Why,  then,  aspire  to  the  courtesy  and 
tact  of  ripe  old  world-wise  Europe? 

As  a  rude  young  thing  I  should  not  think  of 
aspiring  to  it,  if  I  did  not  read  on  the  very  next 
page,  perhaps,  that  the  whole  share  of  the  United 
States  in  the  late  war,  from  the  very  beginning 
of  it  to  the  very  end  of  it,  was  merely  a  "military 
parade."  Then  the  "delicacy"  and  the  "sym 
pathy"  and  the  "polite  international  tradition"  of 
this  fine  old  world-wise  representative  are  sud 
denly  brought  not  only  within  my  reach,  but  within 
easy  reach  of  almost  any  one.  The  cook  and  the 
bootblack  and  the  garbage-man  and  I,  and  every 


1981    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

sort  of  low  American,  including  colored  people, 
may  now  burst  out  spontaneously  and  joyously  and 
unashamed  with  all  the  crudities  inherent  in  our 
natures,  knowing  that  we  can  go  rro  farther  in 
manners  of  this  type  than  the  writers  quoted  have 
already  gone — for  the  simple  reason  that  there  is 
no  farther  to  go.  If  that  is  the  degree  of  "tradi 
tional  international  politeness"  required  by  the 
rich  and  mellow  culture  of  an  older  world,  why 
need  a  Ute  or  a  Yahoo  despair  of  it?  Raw  man 
from  Oklahoma  though  I  am,  utterly  unfinished, 
confined  almost  exclusively  to  the  companionship 
of  cows,  backgroundles's,  uncouth,  and  in  social  ex 
perience  a  tadpole,  even  I  can  be  as  delicately 
urbane  as  these  exponents  of  an  Old  World 
culture. 

Now  I  confess  I  have  idealized  the  situation  in 
representing  this  element  as  the  sole  constituent 
of  any  single  periodical.  It  may  constitute  only 
a  part  of  a  magazine  or  newspaper,  and  it  may 
appear  only  sporadically.  Several  magazines 
which  it  pervaded  largely  at  one  time  have  since 
died  of  it,  and  others  seem  about  to  die.  But  it 
is  still  to  be  found  in  reassuring  quantities,  though 
scattered,  and  one  could  at  any  time,  by  judicious 
selection,  make  up  a  Gentleman's  Review. 

I  believe  it  is  not  only  harmless,  but  desirable. 
It  is  not  representative  of  the  English  people  or 
of  any  English  class.  It  is  the  unconscious  bur- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS     199 

lesque — often  a  very  good  one — of  insularity,  and 
the  world  is  the  better  for  a  good  burlesque.  It 
is  no  more  like  the  courteous  and  witty  English 
man  one  meets  in  life  or  in  books  or  in  the  news 
papers  than  is  James  Yellowplush.  If  Major  Pen- 
dennis  or  Podsnap  came  to  life  again  and  turned 
into  literary  persons,  they  would  write  like  The 
Gentleman's  Review.  And  it  is  pleasant  to  meet 
again  the  Pendennises  and  Podsnaps.  Finally  it 
has  supplied  many  objects  of  entertaining  satire  to 
the  best  English  writers  of  plays  and  fiction  during 
our  own  generation.  There  is  only  one  bad  thing 
about  it  and  that  is  entirely  the  fault  of  my  fellow- 
countrymen.  Owing  to  the  unfortunate  colonial 
ism  of  the  American  literary  class,  there  are  quart 
ers  in  which  this  sort  of  thing  is  taken  seriously. 
I  believe  when  that  happens  it  is  a  surprise,  even 
to  the  Gentleman's  Reviewer  himself.  I  believe 
even  he  is  secretly  aware  that,  whatever  nature's 
reason  for  presenting  him  to  a  patient  world  may 
be,  it  cannot  be  for  any  such  purpose  as  that 

In  regard  to  American  manners,  by  the  way, 
what  nonsense  we  ourselves  are  in  the  habit  of 
writing;  why  these  serious  articles  every  now  and 
then  on  the  decline  of  American  manners?  One 
appeared  only  the  other  day  in  a  New  York 
magazine.  Declined  from  what,  I  wonder.  We 
have  no  manners  now,  to  be  sure,  but  there  is  not 
a  sign  that  at  any  moment  of  our  past  history  we 


2oa     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

ever  had  any.  One  would  suppose  that  the  prim 
people  who  tell  us  from  time  to  time  that  the 
"subtle  note  of  real  distinction  is  fading  from  so 
ciety"  would  be  at  some  pains  to  ascertain  when 
and  where  it  had  bloomed.  The  "graceful  civil 
ities  of  our  grandfathers  have  vanished,"  they  say. 
But  do  they  mean  literally  grandfathers?  If  so, 
that  would  take  us  back  to  about  the  era  of  Mr. 
Potiphar  and  the  Reverend  Cream  Cheese  and 
ormolu  and  universal  drunkenness.  If  they  mean 
great-grandfathers,  one  has  a  notion  that  about 
that  time  the  Hon.  Lafayette  Kettle  and  Hannibal 
Chollop  were  not  uncommon  types.  If  they  insist 
on  the  eighteen-thirties,  the  "subtle  note  c*  real 
distinction"  must  have  been  extremely  hard  to 
find,  to  judge  from  de  Tocqueville  and  Mrs.  Trol- 
lope,  while  in  the  decade  before  that,  Stendhal 
and  the  younger  Gallatin  had  never  found  a  trace 
of  it.  Sometimes  they  wave  the  hand  in  a  general 
sort  of  way  to  the  "gentle  courtesies  of  a  hundred 
years  ago,"  but  it  was  at  about  that  date,  I  believe, 
that  Tom  Moore  was  complaining  that  our  man 
ners  were  rotten  before  they  were  ripe,  while  at 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century  we  find  that 
very  agreeable  French  gentlman,  M.  Moreaud  de 
Saint-Mery,  remarking  the  singular  brutality  of 
the  gentle  families  of  Philadelphia — not  in  a  very 
exacting  temper,  either,  for  he  merely  insisted  that 
people  ought  to  show  more  of  a  spirit  of  social 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS     201 

helpfulness  than  to  go  on  skating  while  their 
friends  were  falling  through  the  ice  and  drowning. 
And  these  being  merely  the  haphazard  recollec 
tions  of  extremely  desultory  readings,  one  natur 
ally  infers  that  the  bibliography  of  bad  manners 
must  be  enormous  and  that  the  dates  in  it,  as  the 
history  of  the  country  goes,  would  probably  be  of 
quite  respectable  antiquity.  I  do  not  deny  that 
there  may  tiave  been  "graceful  civilities"  at  some 
time  or  other, possibly  at  Plymouth  Rock;  I  merely 
say  that  these  writers  never  by  any  chance  produce 
the  proof  of  it,  despite  one's  pardonable  skeptic 
ism.  These  decorous  little  lamentations  on  de 
cline  do,  indeed,  boil  down  to  nothing.  It  is  as  if 
one  should  say,  the  "subtle  note  of  real  distinction" 
has  within  the  last  five  years  faded  from  the  sub 
way,  or  manners  are  no  longer  courtly  on  the 
uptown  evening  car. 

The  frequent  appearance  of  these  articles  brings 
out  an  important  point  of  difference  between 
French  manners  and  our  own.  An  Englishman 
might  write  such  articles,  but  a  Frenchman,  I 
believe  could  not.  Sensible  Americans  go  to 
France  for  the  purpose  of  escaping  the  type 
of  mind  that  produces  them.  They  have 
nothing  to  do  with  manners,  but  are  merely 
treatises  on  toothpick  orthodoxy.  One  of  them 
begins  with  an  anecdote  of  a  "distinguished 
foreigner"  who,  when  asked  what  he  thought  was 


202,    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

the  most  striking  American  characteristic,  replied, 
"Your  lack  of  respect  for  your  superiors."  After 
rubbing  that  in  for  the  proper  hygienic  interval, 
the  writer  advances  to  a  series  of  salutary  reflec 
tions  like  these:  "Nothing  can  be  further  from 
the  truth  than  the  conception  that  personal  delicacy 
means  personal  weakness,"  and  the  "unmannered 
man  adds  nothing  to  the  picture  of  life."  Why 
add  to  the  national  stock  of  uneasy  self-conscious 
ness?  Surely  there  is  no  country  on  the  face  of 
the  globe  where  so  many  people  to  the  square  mile 
are  fidgetting  over  some  perfectly  worthless  pro 
priety.  Silent  prayer  is  the  only  recourse  for  any 
honest  writer  of  this  type.  The  moment  he 
preaches  manners  to  us  he  puckers  us  up  still  more. 
And  there  is  this  further  peril  in  the  thumping 
hortatory  evangel  on  the  need  of  being  personally 
delicate  and  refined,  delivered  by  people  who  from 
their  manner  of  writing  seem  as  much  alike  and 
rudimentary  as  doughnuts.  If  they  keep  it  up 
they  will  surely  start  a  Movement.  We  can  or 
ganize  for  politeness  just  as  well  as  for  mother 
hood  or  for  reading  poetry,  and  a  Federation  of 
Clubs  of  Gentlemanly  Endeavor  may  be  even  now 
in  the  wind.  The  very  next  writer  of  this  article 
might  in  the  natural  order  of  things  find  himself 
president  of  a  "nation-wide"  organization  for  the 
promotion  of  personal  delicacy,  or  at  least  chair 
man  of  his  State  committee  on  drawing-room 


THE- CHOICE  OF  BAD  MANNERS     203 

charm.  I  can  hear  the  speech  at  the  founder's  din 
ner,  for,  of  course,  the  thing  would  begin  with  a 
dinner: 

"Gentlemen,  the  mark  of  this  era  of  social 
awakening  is,  as  you  well  know,  the  spirit  of  or 
ganized  social  service.  People  have  organized  in 
our  day  even  in  order  to  chew  their  own  food, 
and  the  associations  for  digestion,  for  child-rear 
ing,  for  controlling  child-birth,  for  eating  bran, 
going  barefoot,  reading  prose,  keeping  healthy, 
and  looking  at  birds  are  innumerable.  What  the 
individual  used  formerly  to  attempt  in  a  feeble 
manner  on  his  own  account  he  now  does  efficiently 
by  co-operative  endeavor.  Things  that  in  the  old 
days  no  one  supposed  could  be  organized  are  now 
discharged  by  thoroughly  competent  societies. 
For  example,  as  you  probably  know,  American 
poetry  was  organized  not  long  ago,  with  head 
quarters  at  Boston,  the  secretary  being  some  mem 
ber  of  the  Lowell  family,  I  believe;  and  every  one 
of  you  is  doubtless  familiar  with  the  practically 
complete  organization  of  posterity  under  eugeni- 
cal  auspices.  Now,  if  after  two  and  a  half  centur 
ies  personal  delicacy,  and  that  subtle  something 
which  distinguishes  the  manners  of  other  peoples, 
notably  the  French,  from  our  own  cannot  be  had 
by  individual  initiative,  it  is  higih  time  we  employed 
the  measures  already  so  successful  in  other  fields. 
It  is  unreasonable  to  protest  against  our  pro- 


204    THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

gramme  on  the  ground  that  personal  delicacy  can 
not  be  organized.  The  same  argument  was  ad 
vanced  against  the  organization  of  agricultural 
credit  several  years  ago.  Nor  is  there  any  force 
in  the  argument  that  at  intervals  of  three  months 
for  twenty  years  articles  of  equal  merit  have  ap 
peared  in  American  magazines,  each  pointing  to 
perfect  breeding  without  apparently  doing  any 
good.  Our  propaganda  involves  the  printing  of 
five  such  articles  every  month,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  leaflets,  folders  and  newspaper  paragraphs 
tKat  will  pour  in  a  steady  stream  into  every  corner 
of  the  country.  It  is  a  campaign  of  education  that 
we  have  in  mind.  To  any  one  who  objects  that 
no  scheme  for  the  promotion  of  personal  delicacy 
has  ever  yet  succeeded,  I  reply  always  with  the 
simple  question:  "How  many  well-printed,  attrac 
tive  folders  were  sent  out?"  and  he  always  sub 
sides  immediately." 


TAILOR    BLOOD    AND    THE    ARISTOC 
RACY  OF  FICTION 

Although,  as  is  well  known,  tailoring  ran  for 
three  generations  in  the  family  of  George  Mer 
edith,  it  would  seem  from  a  recent  biography  that 
his  own  blood  was  nearly  free  from  it  at  the  age 
of  two.  At  that  age  when  another  boy  (aged 
four)  came  to  visit  him,  he  showed,  according  to 
his  biographer,  such  a  marked  hauteur  of  manner 
that  the  other  boy  left  the  house,  never  to  return. 
The  aristocratic  element  in  the  blood  had,  he 
thinks,  even  then  overcome  the  tailor  corpuscles. 

Though  hauteur  at  the  age  of  two  seems  to  this 
biographer  incompatible  with  tailor  origin,  he 
does  not  on  that  account  reject  the  tailor  origin. 
He  does  not,  like  other  writers  on  Meredith,  in 
vent  a  noble  father  for  Meredith,  or  omit  his  birth 
altogether,  or  call  it  "mysterious,"  or  dismiss  it 
with  the  usual  gasp:  "Born  of  a  tailor;  who 
would  have  thought  it!"  On  the  contrary,  he 
decides  to  make  the  best  of  this  whole  bad  tailor 
business.  They  were  fashionable  tailors,  at  any 
rate,  he  says,  and  they  may  have  fitted  clothes  to 
admirals  in  the  Royal  Navy;  and  the  grandfather, 
the  'Great  Mel,'  had  associated  on  equal  terms 

205 


206     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

with  county  families — was  quite  the  fine  gentle 
man,  indeed;  and  George  had  inherited  the  gentle 
man  part  of  this  grandfather,  while  escaping  every 
trace  of  the  tailor  portion. 

I  am  not  a  syndicalist  and  I  have  no  especial 
sympathy  with  a  tailor  soviet.  I  certainly  should 
no  more  care  to  live  under  a  tailor  dictatorship 
than  under  that  of  any  other  labor  union.  But 
if  the  tailor  revolution  had  to  come,  and  the 
bombs  were  flying  and  the  streets  flowing  with 
the  blood  of  customers,  I  should  be  happy  to  see 
certain  writers  on  George  Meredith  fall  into  the 
hands  of  the  infuriated  mob. 

A  reasonable  view  of  the  relation  between  tail 
oring  and  aristocracy  has  been  quite  beyond  the 
power  of  Meredith  commentators —  most  of  them 
having  gone  all  to  gooseflesh  at  the  bare  thought 
of  it.  And  yet  Meredith  could  never  have  written 
about  upper  classes  as  he  did,  if  he  had  not  been 
the  son  of  a  tailor.  Only  as  the  son  of  a  tailor 
could  he  have  imagined  so  many  of  those  radiant 
beings  among  the  daughters  of  earls.  As  the  son 
of  an  earl,  he  would  probably  have  imagined  them 
among  the  daughters  of  tailors.  At  all  events, 
we  should  not  find  them  among  the  daughters  of 
earls  in  any  such  proportion  as  we  now  find  them 
in  his  novels.  Tailor-distance  from  an  aristocracy 
in  our  day  is  the  only  safe  distance  for  purpose 
of  enchantment. 


ARISTOCRACY  OF  FICTION       207 

And  I  wonder  if  our  own  "best  society"  would 
not  have  stood  a  better  chance  in  fiction  if  Ameri 
can  .novelists  had  been  sons  of  tailors.  Not  of 
course  that  tailor  birth  would  have  made  up  for 
the  lack  of  certain  other  qualities  that  Meredith 
possessed,  but  it  might  at  least  have  helped  a  little. 

There  has  never  been  enough  illusion  about  our 
upper  class,  especially  among  the  talented.  In 
fact  the  more  talented  people  are,  the  less  enthusi 
astic  they  seem  to  be  about  our  upper  class.  Gifted 
novelists  who  know  our  upper  class  will  die  in  exile 
rather  than  go  on  knowing  it.  Bare  acquaintance 
with  our  upper  class  drove  Henry  James  from 
this  country  for  ever;  better  acquaintance  with  it 
made  him  the  most  loyal  subject  of  the  British 
Crown.  Others  have  rebounded  from  contact 
with  our  upper  classes  into  the  mountains  of  Ver 
mont.  A  gifted  writer  who  has  once  met  the 
better  sort  of  people  in  New  York  will  often  re 
main  for  ever  after  rooted  in  the  Middle  Ages. 
Nothing  seems  to  kill  so  quickly  all  enthusiasm 
for  our  upper  class  as  contact  with  it.  Even  the 
dhance  of  contact  checks  the  flow  of  fancy. 

It  is  possible  that  a  really  interesting  figure  in 
our  upper  class  could  be  created  only  in  the  back 
woods  by  a  writer  of  great  talent  who  had  never 
once  emerged.  But  tailor-distance  from  our  upper 
class  might  have  done  something.  It  is  conceiv 
able  that  a  glamour  might  be  cast  over  our  lead- 


208     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

ing  families  at  tailor-distance,  by  a  strong  novelist 
who  was  naturally  good  at  glamour-casting.  A 
cook  could  not  write  a  good  American  novel  of 
caste,  being  in  too  close  contact  with  the  family, 
but  a  tailor  might. 

No  American  novelist  of  the  first  rank,  I  be 
lieve,  has  ever  taken  American  social  distinctions 
with  a  tailor  seriousness.  Something  of  a  tailor 
seriousness  in  that  matter  will  be  found  of  course 
among  many  good  American  story-writers,  but 
they  are  not  of  the  highest  rank.  Tailor-birth, 
for  example,  would  hardly  have  enabled  the  late 
Richard  Harding  Davis  to  improve  on  his  New 
York  heroes  and  heroines,  probably  would  not  have 
have  resulted  in  any  change  at  all.  Tailor-birth 
would  not  have  enabled  Mr.  Robert  W.  Chambers 
to  throw  more  of  a  glamour  over  the  golden  few 
than  he  has  thrown  without  it.  But  the  fiction  of 
well-bred  people  in  this  country  has  never  had  the 
benefit  of  that  Meredith  combination  of  tailor- 
birth  and  great  talent. 

Suppose  Mr.  Howells  had  been  tailor-born 
while  remaining  equally  gifted,  for  example.  He 
might  have  turned  on  that  upper  class  of  Boston 
a  kindling  and  imaginative  eye.  He  might  have 
imagined  Meredithian  aristocrats  in  Boston — in 
teresting  people  who  did  as  they  plea'sed.  High 
birth  in  Boston  need  not  have  been  the  unpleasant 
thing  he  describes — making  everybody  feel  what 


ARISTOCRACY  OF  FICTION       209 

a  blessing  it  is  to  be  born  low  and  elsewhere. 
High  birth  in  Boston,  seen  through  the  social  haze 
of  tailor-distance,  might  have  seemed  to  him  desir 
able.  At  all  events  he  would  not  have  learned  that 
every  well-bred  Boston  person  must  be  wwdesir- 
able.  He  would  not  have  made  it  a  law  of  his 
fiction  that,  whereas  interesting  people  who  do  as 
they  please  are  imaginable,  they  are  not  even  by 
the  wildest  riot  of  the  fancy  ever  to  be  placed 
among  the  upper  class  of  Boston.  Tailoring 
would  have  mitigated  these  rigorous  results  of  a 
too  close  observation. 

Despite  the  confusion  of  classes  in  our  time 
when  you  never  can  guess  what  people  will  be 
like  from  the  sort  of  families  they  are  found  in, 
Meredith  could  still  believe  that  Blood  will  tell. 
And  he  believed  blood  told  delightfully  and  in 
the  most  minute  detail.  He  believed  that  aristo 
cratic  noses  were  found  on  women  of  the  highest 
class  instead  of  belonging  as  they  generally  do  to 
shop  girls.  He  believed  in  a  noble  bearing 
peculiar  to  lords  which  is  really  common  to  police 
men.  He  imagined  in  earls  the  magnificent  and 
aristocratic  poise  and  the  beauty  of  Italian  day 
labourers.  He  believed  duchesses  walked  like 
duchesses,  when,  if  we  may  judge  from  photc*- 
graphs,  they  must,  rather,  have  tumbled  around; 
and  he  believed  that  people  were  as  stately  as  he 
thought  they  ought  to  be  when  he  looked  at  the 


2 1  o     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

dignified  and  imposing  castles  that  they  lived  in. 

And  wit  ran  in  direct  ratio  to  the  good  birth 
of  his  characters,  and  not  inversely.  That  was  the 
final  touch  of  tailor  sublimity.  Meredith  not  only 
made  aristocrats  witty  in  their  homes;  he  made 
polite  society  dine  out  wittily.  Brilliant  talk,  such 
as  is  carried  on  by  Jews,  and  tolerated  nowhere 
in  the  best  society,  was  attributed  by  Meredith  to 
the  class  of  people  by  whom  the  dullest  things  in 
the  world  have  been  said  and  about  whom  the 
dullest  books  in  the  world  have  been  written. 

Henry  James,  born  in  a  Harlem  tailor-shop 
and  never  straying  far  away,  Henry  James,  with 
three  tailor  ancestors  looking  down  from  the  walls 
upon  him,  might  have  imagined  five  divinely  com 
plicated  women  east  of  Central  Park, — at  least  he 
would  not  have  absolutely  refused  even  to  try,  on 
the  ground  that  they  were  unimaginable.  Henry 
James  might  have  worked  wonders  of  aristocratic 
subtlety  even  here,  had  he  remained  innocent 
enough,  and  tailoring  was  one  of  the  few  remain 
ing  guarantees  of  social  innocence. 

I  do  not  say  that  glorious  creatures  like  Laura 
Middleton,  or  Diama,  or  Aminta,  or  the  other 
goddesses  of  George  Meredith  could  have  been 
freely  sprinkled  in  our  upper  class  by  any  imagina 
tion  short  of  Meredith's,  even  with  Meredith's 
three-fold  tailor  start.  But  I  do  say  that  much 
migiht  have  been  done  for  our  upper  class  in  fiction 


ARISTOCRACY  OF  FICTION       211 

by  an  imagination  raised  to  the  third  tailor-power 
by  inheritance.  It  never  has  had  this  supreme 
literary  chance.  What  are  known  as  social  ad 
vantages  in  this  country  have  been  fatal  to  any 
thing  like  a  poetic  conception  of  our  upper  class. 
Never  show  a  gifted  novelist  above  the  basement 
stairs,  if  you  wish  him  to  retain  an  exciting  sense 
of  social  altitudes.  Keep  the  better  sort  of  liter 
ary  men  away  from  anybody  of  the  slightest  social 
importance,  if  you  wish  any  glamour  to  be  cast. 
Aristocracies  of  fiction  will  never  be  perceived 
so  long  as  the  eyes  are  open. 

In  spite  of  the  Saturday  Review,  and  parliamen 
tary  speeches,  and  the  London  Times,  and  Justin 
McCarthy's  Reminiscences,  and  the  vast  volume 
of  aristocratic  British  memoirs  published  by  the 
score  every  year  in  Meredith's  lifetime  and  our 
own,  he  created  by  sheer  force  of  genius,  guided 
by  an  inherited  inclination,  the  illusion  that  the 
very  highest  families  in  England  could  be  amus 
ing  in  their  homes.  Meredith  successfully  em 
bodied  such  a  vision  of  aristocracy  as  nowadays 
can  be  confidently  entertained  only  by  three  old 
maids  washing  dishes  in  a  farm  house.  It  is  ab 
surd  to  imagine,  as  the  biographer  does,  whom  I 
have  quoted  at  the  beginning  of  this  article,  that 
there  was  no  tailor  in  the  blood. 

In  the  present  muddle  of  a  changing  social 
order,  with  the  upper  class  being  slowly  educated 


2 1 2     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

by  the  classes  below,  and  getting  the  little  wit  it 
has  from  them,  and  all  the  clever  people  in  one 
clasis  flying  immediately  into  another,  up  or  down, 
with  blood  telling  the  wrong  story  and  usually  a 
very  dull  one;  with  people  everywhere  turning  out 
to  be  just  wihat  they  ought  not  to  be  from  their 
antecedents  and  surroundings,  and  with  the  most 
remarkable  of  public  characters  commonly  the 
most  deadly  objects  to  the  private  gaze — in  these 
conditions  of  our  generation,  a  feat  such  as  Mere 
dith  achieved  becomes  increasingly  difficult.  It 
requires,  at  the  least,  the  advantage  of  a  tailor 
ancestry. 


OUR    REFINEMENT 

I  do  not  object  to  that  excellent  lady  who  is 
to  be  found  at  intervals  in  the  literary  columns  of 
a  serious  magazine  wondering  sweetly  what  the 
May-fly  thinks  in  June.  On  the  contrary,  a  May 
fly  is  a  good  enough  excuse  for  wonder  and 
wonder  is  a  good  enough  excuse  for  the  most 
exciting  kind  of  imaginative  exercise.  There  is 
no  reason  why  the  intimations  of  immortality  con 
veyed  to  ladies  by  May-flys  should  not  be  a  perma 
nent  part  of  every  serious  magazine  on  earth, 

I  do  not  object,  that  is  to  say,  to  the  situation 
itself.  I  object  only  to  one  appalling  circumstance. 
It  is  always  the  same  lady  and  she  is  always  say 
ing  exactly  the  same  sweet  things,  and  the  lan 
guage  she  says  them  in  is  not  a  living  human 
language.  The  objectionable  thing  is  the  awful 
iterativeness  of  its  subhuman  literary  propriety. 

And  it  is  the  same  way  with  all  those  other 
things  expressive  of  literary  refinement,  expressive 
of  nothing  else,  but  recurring  with  a  deadly  cer 
tainty,  weekly,  monthly,  perennially,  and  perhaps 
eternally.  Those  pious  papers  on  the  comic  spirit, 
by  American  professors  of  English;  those  happy 

213 


2 1 4     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

thoughts  on  the  pleasure  of  reading  good  books 
rather  than  bad;  on  the  imperishable  charm  of 
that  which  is  imperishably  charming;  on  the  su 
periority  of  tihe  "things  of  the  spirit"  over  other 
things  not  mentioned  but  presumably  gross,  such 
as  things  on  the  dinner  table;  humorous  apologues 
of  Dame  Experience  conceived  as  a  schoolmis 
tress;  tender  souvenirs  of  quaint  great-uncles; 
peeps  at  a  sparrow,  nesting — it  would  be  a  sin 
to  blame  them  from  any  other  point  of  view  than 
that  of  the  future  of  the  English  language,  for  the 
subjects  are  irreproachable  and  the  motives  that 
actuate  the  writers  on  them  are  as  pure  as  the 
driven  snow.  But  they  are  the  mimetic  gentilities 
of  what  may  be  called  our  upper  middle  literary 
class  and  they  are  not  expressed  in  any  living 
language.  Indeed  they  tend  to  rob  a  language  of 
any  hope  to  live. 

Not,  of  course,  that  English  style  is  a  mere 
matter  of  vocabulary  or  that  the  most  rollicking 
use  of  the  American  vernacular  in  utter  Shakes 
pearean  defiance  of  propriety  would  bring  Shakes 
pearean  results.  But  distinguishable  writing  does 
after  all  derive  from  an  immense  catholicity  and 
a  freedom  of  choice,  not  only  from  among  words 
that  are  read  but  from  among  words  that  are 
lived  with.  Nor  can  it  possibly  dispense  with  what 
the  French  call  the  "green"  language — least  of  all 
in  this  country  where  the  "green"  language  has 


OUR  REFINEMENT  2 1 5 

already  acquired  a  vigor  and  variety  that  is  mot  to 
be  found  in  the  books. 

Take  for  example  a  passage  from  almost  any 
serious  article  in  an  American  magazine,  say  in 
regard  to  the  reconstruction  of  American  educa 
tion  after  the  war,  for  nobody  had  the  slightest 
notion  what  he  was  writing  about  when  he  was 
writing  on  that  subject,  and  there  is  never  any 
idea  in  the  article  that  might  distract  attention 
from  the  words. 

"It  can  scarcely  be  denied  that  the  vital  needs  of  the 
hour  call  for  something  more  than  the  disparate  and 
unco-ordinated  efforts  which  were  unhappily  often  the 
mark  of  educational  endeavor  in  the  past.  That  looms 
large  in  the  lesson  of  the  war.  If  it  has  taught  us  nothing 
else  the  war  has  at  least  taught  us  the  necessity  of  a 
synthetic  direction  of  educational  agencies  toward  a  defi 
nite  and  realized  goal,  humanistic  in  the  broad  and  per 
manent  sense  of  the  term,  humanistic,  that  is  to  say,  with 
due  reference  to  the  changing  conditions  of  Society. 
The  policy  of  drift  must  be  abandoned  once  and  for  all 
and  for  it  must  be  substituted  a  policy  of  steadfast, 
watchful — etc." 

Not  that  I  have  seen  this  particular  passage  in 
an  article  on  the  reconstruction  of  education,  but 
it  might  be  found  in  any  of  them.  It  is  exactly  in 
the  vein  of  all  that  I  have  happened  to  read;  and 
Jn  the  best  American  magazines  you  will  some- 
jtimes  find  four  pages  of  eight  hundred  words 
Apiece  all  made  up  of  just  such  sentences. 


2 1 6     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

Compare  it  for  imaginative  energy,  ingenuity, 
humor,  any  literary  quality  you  like,  with  the  fol 
lowing  selections  from  a  recent  volume  on  Ameri 
canisms  and  slang: 

"See  the  elephant,  crack  up,  make  a  kick,  buck  the 
tiger,  jump  on  with  both  feet,  go  the  whole  hog,  know 
the  ropes,  get  solid,  plank  down,  make  the  fur  fly,  put  a 
bug  in  the  ear,  haloo,  halloa,  hello,  and  sometimes  holler 
get  the  dead-wood  on,  die  with  your  boots  on,  horn- 
swoggle,  ker-flap,  ker-splash,  beat  it,  butt  in,  give  a  show 
down,  cut-up,  kick-in,  start-off,  run-in,  and  jump  off,  put 
it  over,  put  it  across,  don't  be  a  high-brow,  road-louse, 
sob-sister,  lounge-lizard,  rube,  boob,  kike,  or  has-been." 

The  style  of  this  paragraph  is  by  no  means  so 
good  as  would  have  resulted  from  a  more  careful 
selection,  for  the  words  are  taken  at  random  and 
most  of  them  are  stale.  Moreover,  the  words  are 
not  nearly  so  imaginative  or  vigorous  as  seven 
teenth  century  terms,  since  forgotten  by  the  minc 
ing  generations.  The  text,  for  example,  is  not 
for  a  moment  to  be  compared  with  that  of  Sir 
Thomas  Urquhart's  "Rabelais."  But  even  as  it 
is,  it  is  immeasurably  better  than  my  educational 
extract  and  it  is  just  as  pertinent  to  the  subject  of 
education — probably  more  so.  The  substitution 
of  these  lists  for  the  usual  university  president's 
magazine  contribution  on  educational  reconstruc 
tion  problems  would  have  helped  just  as  much,  if 
not  more,  to  the  solution  of  the  problems,  besides 


OUR  REFINEMENT  217 

being  pleasanter  to  read.  Such  lists  might,  I 
think,  replace  with  advantage  much  of  what  is 
called  "inspirational  literature. "  "New  Thought," 
for  example,  might  have  spared  itself  thousands 
upon  thousands  of  its  pages  by  simple  repetition 
of  these  lists. 

There  were  many  barkeepers — in  better  days, 
of  course — who,  if  they  oould  have  learned  the 
literary  language  without  losing  grip  on  their  own, 
might  have  made  good  writers.  There  are  no 
professors  of  English  literature  who  could  learn 
to  write  the  language  even  if  you  gave  them  all 
the  advantages  of  barkeepers.  They  lack  the  bar 
keeper's  fine,  reckless  imagination  in  the  use  of 
words.  They  cannot  appropriate  a  word,  or 
stretch  it,  or  make  it  do  something  it  had  not  done 
before,  or  still  less  create  it  out  of  nothing.  They 
could  not  even  interest  themselves  in  the  "green" 
language;  their  interest  arises  only  when  it  is  dry. 
Never,  like  a  washwoman,  or  a  poet,  could  they 
add  to  the  capacities  o-f  human  speech.  Their 
lives  are  spent  in  reducing  them.  Language  would 
never  grow  if  ruled  by  the  American  upper  middle 
literary  class.  It  would  stiffen  and  die.  Our  college 
chairs  of  English  and  our  magazines  for  "cul 
tured"  persons  probably  do  more  to  prevent  the 
adequate  use  of  our  common  speech  than  any  other 
influences. 

Distinguishable    English    sometimes    may    be 


2 1 8     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

found  in  an  American  newspaper;  it  is  never  found 
in  an  American  literary  magazine.  In  some  cor 
ner  of  a  newspaper  you  may  find  a  man  writing 
with  freedom  and  a  sort  of  natural  tact,  choosing 
the  words  he  really  needs  without  regard  to 
what  is  vulgar  or  what  is  polite.  People  are  apt 
to  read  it  aloud  to  you  without  knowing  why; 
they  like  the  sound  of  it.  That  never  happens  in  a 
literary  magazine.  Nobody  in  a  literary  magazine 
fits  words  to  thought;  he  fits  his  thoughts  to  a 
borrowed  diction.  Nobody  in  a  literary  magazine 
cares  a  hang  about  the  right  word  for  the  ex 
pression  of  his  thought  but  he  is  worried  to  death 
about  diction.  All  the  best  contemporary  literary 
essays  are  written  in  diction  and  there  is  no*  more 
telling  the  writers  apart,  so  far  as  their  style  is 
concerned,  than  if  they  were  all  buried  in  equally 
good  taste  by  the  same  undertaker. 

Diction  is  the  great  funereal  American  literary 
substitute  for  style.  Indeed  that  is  what  they 
mean  when  they  praise  an  author's  style.  They 
do  not  mean  that  he  has  his  own  style  of  writing; 
they  mean  that  he  is  in  the  style  of  writing. 

Measured  by  the  vitality  of  masterpieces,  news 
paper  English  is  sometimes  fairly  good;  literary 
magazine  English  is  never  good.  Bad  English  is 
English  about  to  die,  such  as  you  see  in  the  maga 
zines;  the  worst  English  is  English  that  has  never 
lived — it  is  the  English  of  American  belles-lettres. 


OUR  REFINEMENT  2 1 9 

That  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  I  hate  the  self- 
improved,  traveled  American  whom  I  meet  in 
books  and  periodicals.  I  hate  him  also  for  what 
seems  to  me  the  servility  of  his  spirit  in  the  pres 
ence  of  other  people's  past.  I  dare  say  it  may  be 
because  I  envy  him  his  advantages.  That  is  what 
the  cultivated  person  always  implies,  and  he  wond 
ers  how  any  one,  in  view  of  the  national  crudity, 
can  have  the  heart  to  find  fault  with  these  mis 
sionaries  of  taste  from  a  riper  culture  who  have 
learned  the  value  of  artistic  milieux  and  literary 
backgrounds.  After  all,  he  says,  what  Henry 
James  would  call  the  "European  scene"  may  still 
be  commended  to  Americans,  and  surely  it  is  just 
as  well  that  they  should  be  reminded  now  and 
then  of  what  Professor  Barrett  Wendell  used  so 
admirably  to  term  their  "centuries  of  social  in 
experience."  Nevertheless  as  he  goes  on  I  not 
only  feel  that  I  aim  coarse,  but  I  like  the  feeling  of 
it;  and  for  the  sake  of  other  people  of  my  own 
course  type  I  will  present  here  the  excuses  of 
vulgarity. 

I  have  never  been  in  Paterson,  N.  J.,  and  I 
have  never  been  in  Venice,  and  so  far  as  direct 
esthetic  personal  consequences  to  myself  of  golden 
hours  of  dalliance  in  the  two  places  are  concerned, 
I  am  therefore  unable  to  offer  a  comparison.  But 
during  my  life  I  have  met  many  returned  travelers 
from  Venice  and  from  Paterson  and  I  have  read 


220     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

or  listened  to  their  narratives  with  as  much  atten 
tion  as  they  could  reasonably  demand.  Theoretic 
ally,  I  accept  the  opinion  of  enlightened  persons 
that  Venice  is  superior,  in  respect  to  what  edu 
cators  call  its  "cultural  value, "  to  Paterson.  Prac 
tically,  and  judging  merely  from  the  effects  upon 
the  respective  visitors,  I  -am  all  for  Paterson.  I 
have  never  met  a  man  w(ho  returned  from  Pater 
son  talking  like  the  stray  pages  of  a  catalogue, 
of  which  he  had  a  complete  copy  before  he  started. 
Paterson  never  took  away  part  of  a  man's  mind 
and  replaced  it  with  a  portion  of  an  encyclopedia. 
Nobody  ever  came  back  from  Paterson  damaged 
as  a  man  and  yet  inferior  as  a  magazine  article. 
For  the  careless  person  I  should  recommend  Ven 
ice;  for  the  culture -seeker,  Paterson.  Overstrain, 
that  misery  of  the  conscientious  selfamproving 
man,  with  its  disagreeable  effects  upon  other  peo 
ple,  could  be  avoided  in  Paterson.  Out  of  ten 
essays  on  Venice  that  I  have  read,  nine  were  writ 
ten  by  fish  out  of  water  who  might  have  swum 
easily  and  perhaps  with  grace  in  the  artistic  cur 
rents  of  Paterson. 

•A  self-improved  American  delivered  an  apolo 
getic  discourse  the  other  day  on  the  American  de 
ficiency  in  backgrounds.  Culture  cannot  take  root, 
he  said;  families  float;  everybody  dies  in  a  town 
he  was  not  born  in;  art  bombinates  in  a  vacuum; 
literature  gathers  no  moss;  manners,  when  they 


OUR  REFINEMENT  221 

exist  at  all,  are  accidental;  history  is  clean  gone 
out  of  our  heads,  while  every  Englishman  is 
familiar  with  Bannockburn ;  poetry  cannot  be  writ 
ten,  and  it  is  foolish  to  try,  on  account  of  the 
dearth  of  venerable  circumstance;  no  traditions, 
no  memories,  no  inheritance — in  fact,  no  past  at 
all;  not  even  a  present  of  any  consequence,  but 
only  a  future;  and  into  this  future  every  man, 
woman,  and  child  in  the  whole  foolish  country  is 
moving — though  it  is  not  through  any  fault  of 
theirs  for  the  unfortunate  inhabitants  really  have 
no  other  place  to  go  to. 

I  bear  no  grudge  against  the  author  of  this 
discourse  as  an  individual,  but  only  as  a  type.  In 
deed,  I  am  not  sure  that  he  is  an  individual  or 
that  I  have  reported  him  correctly,  for  no  sooner 
does  any  one  begin  in  this  manner  than  his  words 
run  into  the  words  of  others,  forming  a  river  of 
sound,  and  I  think  not  of  one  man,  but  of  strings 
of  them — all  worrying  about  the  lack  of  back 
grounds,  like  the  man  who  cast  no  shadow  in  the 
sun.  I  deny  that  it  is  any  one's  voluntary  attitude ; 
it  is  a  lockstep  that  began  before  I  was  born,  and 
I  have  no  doubt  it  will  continue  indefinitely.  Seven 
centuries  after  Columbus's  injudicious  discovery 
they  will  still  be  complaining,  with  a  Baedeker  in 
their  hands,  of  the  fatal  youth  of  North  America. 
For  they  live  long,  -these  people,  because,  as  in 
certain  lower  orders  of  animal  life,  apparently, 


222     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

there  is  hardly  any  life  worth  losing,  and  the 
family  likeness  they  bear  to  one  another  is  aston 
ishing.  The  very  ones  that  George  William  Cur 
tis  used  to  satirize  as  shining  in  society  are  still 
to  be  found  among  us  at  this  moment,  but  they  are 
engaged  for  the  most  part  in  contributing  to  the 
magazines.  In  one  resp'ect  they  seem  more  the 
slaves  of  other  people's  backgrounds  even  than 
Mrs.  Potiphar  was.  Mrs.  Potiphar  only  believed 
that  the  right  sort  of  liveries  were  not  produced  in 
this  country,  whereas  they  swear  that  the  right 
sort  of  literature  can  never  be  produced  in  this 
country — or  at  least  not  till  our  backgrounds  are 
ever  so  many  centuries  thicker  than  they  are  now. 
I  am  unable,  looking  back,  to  see  any  value  what 
ever  in  these  decades  of  sheer  sterile  complaint  of 
sterility,  because  no  ruins  can  be  seen  against  the 
sky,  because  no  naiads  are  dreamed  of  in  the 
Hudson  or  mermaids  in  Cape  Cod  Bay,  and  be 
cause  most  people  who  are  born  in  Indianapolis 
seem  glad  to  get  away  from  it  when  they  can. 

For  one  sign  that  we  have  changed  too  fast  I 
can  produce  two  signs  that  we  have  not  changed 
half  fast  enough.  If  there  is  no  moss  here  on 
the  walls  of  ancient  battlements  there  is  plenty 
of  moss  in  our  heads,  and,  so  far  as  tenacity  of 
tradition  is  concerned,  I  can  produce  a  dozen 
United  States  Senators  who  are  fully  as  pic 
turesque,  if  only  you  will  regard  them  internally, 


OUR  REFINEMENT  223 

as  the  quaintest  peasant  in  the  quaintest  part  of 
France.  Backgrounds  are  not  lost  here  just  be 
cause  we  move  about;  backgrounds  are  simply 
worn  inside,  often  with  the  ivy  clustering  on  them. 
Who  has  not  talked  with  some  expatriated  Boston 
man  and  found  him  as  reposeful,  as  redolent  of 
sad,  forgotten,  far-off  things,  as  any  distant  pros 
pect  of  Stoke-Pogis?  In  fact,  it  seems  as  if  these 
pale  expositors  of  backgrounds  had  merely  visited 
the  monuments  they  praise — inside  some  Boston 
man — and  that,  I  confess,  is  the  most  irritating 
thing  to  me  about  them.  They  have  never  really 
looked  at  anything  themselves,  but  only  learned 
from  others  what  they  ought  to  seem  to  see.  And 
it  is  absurd  to  tax  us  with  a  lack  of  memory,  when 
in  some  of  our  most  exclusive  literary  circles  there 
is  notoriously  nothing  but  a  memory  to  be  seen. 
There  is  too  much  Stoke-Pogis  in  a  Boston  man, 
if  anything,  in  proportion  to  other  things.  Even 
the  casual  foreign  visitor  has  noticed  it. 

I  have  great  respect  for  the  religion  of  the 
Quakers,  whose  name,  I  understand,  comes  from 
the  phrase  of  a  founder  about  quaking  and  shak 
ing  in  the  fear  of  the  Lord.  And  if  that  is  the 
real  reason  why  they  quake  I  believe  they  are 
justified  not  only  in  their  quaking,  but  in  trying 
to  make  other  people  quake.  But  these  Delsartean 
literary  quakers  correctly  tremulous  in  the  pres 
ence  of  antiquity,  these  "cultured"  minds,  not  only 


224     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

palsied  by  their  own  advantages,  but  intent  on 
palsying  others,  bring  back  no  good  report  to  any 
body  in  regard  to  the  good  things  in  the  world. 

I  do  not  know  whether  a  poet,  like  a  sugar 
beet,  requires  a  soil  with  peculiar  properties;  and, 
in  regard  to  the  poet,  I  do  not  know  what  the 
peculiar  properties  ought  to  be.  Zoning  of  verse, 
comparative  literary  crop  statistics,  mean  annual 
density  of  ideas,  ratio  of  true  poetry  to  square 
miles  and  population  within  a  given  period,  are 
all  outside  my  limitations.  The  t'heory  that  bone- 
dust  fertilizers  are  the  things  for  poets  does  not 
always  seem  to  work,  even  when  the  bone-dust  is 
that  of  the  Crusaders,  and  I  have  read  lyrics  from 
cathedral  towns  which,  though  infinitely  more 
decorous  than  the  brass  band  of  my  native  village, 
were  equally  remote  from  literature.  Still  there 
may  be  something  in  it.  But  I  do  know,  even 
better  than  I  wish  I  did,  two  generations  of  writ 
ers  on  the  theme,  who  have  been  saying,  with 
hardly  any  deviation  in  their  phrases,  that  this  is 
the  land  where  poets  cannot  grow;  and  I  know- 
them  for  the  sort  of  persons  who,  if  by  chance  a 
poet  should  grow  in  defiance  of  their  theory, 
could  not  tell  him  from  a  sugar  beet.  They  are 
unaware  of  any  growing  thing  which  stands  be 
fore  them  unaccompanied  by  bibliography.  Un 
less  there  were  antecedent  books  about  an  object 
they  would  not  know  that  the  object  was  a  poet. 


OUR  REFINEMENT  225 

As  the  words  culture  and  refinement  have  been 
applied  and  as  they  have  been  exemplified  in 
American  letters  they  have  come  to  carry  a  curse 
for  all  save  little  bands  of  unpleasant  and  self-con 
scious  persons  who  are  themselves  fidgetting  about 
it.  "Culture"  is  not  absorbed,  but  packed  in,  al 
ways  with  a  view  to  being  taken  out  again  with 
out  a  wrinkle  in  it,  and  it  does  nothing  to  the  man 
who  gets  it,  but  he  means  to  do  a  lot  with  it  to 
you.  It  is  absurd  to  suppose  that  the  human  con 
tainer  of  it  takes  any  personal  interest  in  his 
contents. 

Of  course  I  am  not  speaking  of  the  essence  of 
the  thing,  but  only  of  the  implications  of  the  word 
as  they  have  been  seared  into  our  social  experi 
ence.  I  do  not  mean  that  humane  learning  blasts 
an  American,  but  I  do  mean  that  among  those 
who  are  known  as  cultured  Americans  learning 
is  not  humane.  And  I  am  not  condemning  the 
present  moment.  It  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
rudeness  of  young  people,  jazz  bands,  the  corrup 
tion  of  the  English  language,  the  cot  of  gowns 
down  the  back,  war  psychology,  the  Bolshevism 
of  college  professors,  fox-trotting,  the  neglect  of 
the  classics,  movies,  commercialism,  syndicalism, 
indecencies  on  the  stage,  popular  novels,  femin 
ism,  or  any  other  of  the  unheard-of  horrors  that 
the  middle-aged  mind  associates  with  the  break 
down  of  civilization.  There  is  no  sign  that  Amer- 


226     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

lean  civilization  is  breaking  down  in  this  respect, 
for  the  simple  reason  that  there  is  no  sign  that 
American  civilization  in  this  respect  ever  existed. 
There  is  no  sign  that  among  any  considerable 
body  of  cultured  Americans  learning  was  ever 
humane,  and  it  is  lucky  for  us  that  vivacious  men 
at  every  period  of  our  national  life  have  revolted 
from  it.  Ten  years  of  Greek  study  would  not 
have  hurt  Mark  Twain,  but  ten  years'  contact 
with  the  sort  of  persons  who  studied  Greek  would 
have  destroyed  him.  Historical  studies  would  not 
have  suffocated  Walt  Whitman;  even  after  read 
ing  Bishop  Stufobs  he  might  have  remained  our 
poet  of  democracy.  But  association  with  modern 
historians  would  have  done  for  him.  Had  Walt 
Whitman  taken  the  same  course  that  I  did  at  a 
school  of  political  science,  he  would  have  gone 
mad  or  become  a  college  president. 

What  was  it  that  so  pinched  the  mind  of  Henry 
Adams,  readers  of  the  Education  of  Henry 
Adams  are  always  asking,  though  one  would  think 
the  answer  could  not  be  missed.  It  was  Boston 
and  Cambridge  in  the  eighteen-fifties  and  an  acute 
personal  consciousness  of  membership  in  the 
Adams  family.  It  was  a  lucky  thing  for  both 
Jews  and  Christians  that  Moses  was  not  a  cul 
tured  Boston  man,  for  the  Ten  Commandments 
would  not  only  have  been  multiplied  by  fifty,  but 
a  supplemental  volume  of  thousands  of  really 


OUR  REFINEMENT  227 

indispensable  gentilities  would  have  come  out 
every  year.  No  man  knew  better  than  the 
late  W.  D.  Howells  the  Sinaitic  rigor  of  the  social 
scruple  when  the  descendant  of  the  Puritans  once 
turned  his  conscience  away  from  God  and  bent 
it  upon  culture.  The  genial  tale  of  The  Lady  of 
the  Aroostook  might  well  have  been  a  tragedy. 
Indeed,  the  passion  of  a  man  bred  in  the  right 
Boston  set  and  immensely  conscious  of  it — a  man 
who  read  the  right  books  in  the  right  way,  knew 
the  right  people,  visited  the  right  places  abroad — 
the  passion  of  such  a  man  for  a  girl  who  not  only 
said  "I  want  to  know,"  but  who  had  never  heard 
of  a  chaperon — there  is  a  situation  not  only  tragic 
in  itself,  but  close  to  the  edge  of  violence,  termin 
able,  one  would  say,  only  by  accidental  death, 
murder,  or  suicide.  Desdemona  was  smothered 
for  less.  That  Mr.  Howells  should  see  it  to  a 
comparatively  cheerful  end  without  calling  down 
the  lightning  proves  merely  the  magic  of  his 
hand.  But  Mr.  Howells  did  not  conceal  one 
painful  consequence.  Hero  and  heroine  both 
were  outcasts  from  culture  for  evermore.  Never 
again  did  they  enter  the  doors  of  the  right  people 
of  Cambridge.  "He's  done  the  wisest  thing  he 
could  by  taking  her  out  to  California.  She  never 
would  have  gone  down  here."  This  was  the  doom 
that  culture  pronounced  in  the  final  chapter.  For, 
although  at  nineteen  years  of  age  Lydia  ceased 


228     THE  MARGIN  OF  HESITATION 

to  say  she  wanted  to  know,  the  early  stain  re 
mained.  She  bore  it  to  the  grave.  And  this  end 
ing  was  entirely  just  and  Mr.  Howells  did  not  ex 
aggerate  in  the  slightest  degree  the  rigors  of  the 
law,  for,  though  Lydia  as  he  made  her  was  the 
most  natural  and  adorable  creature  imaginable, 
he  was  right  in  saying  that  in  the  cultured  circles 
of  the  time  and  place  she  would  not  have  gone 
down. 

The  taboo  of  culture  is  of  course  no  new  thing, 
but  dates  from  a  comparatively  ancient  grudge  in 
our  brief  literary  history.  People  are  ashamed  of 
their  culture  nowadays,  a  friend  of  mine  was  say 
ing,  and  he  went  on  to  cite  instances  of  the  ex 
clusion  from  human  intercourse  of  all  those  mat 
ters  of  general  interest  which  make  intercourse 
human.  And  why  are  you  so  afraid  of  general 
ideas?  one  visiting  Frenchman  after  another  has 
asked  me,  and  I  have  never  yet  been  able  to  think 
of  a  suitable  reply.  And  they  go  back  to  France 
on  no  better  terms  with  the  English  language  than 
when  they  came.  It  is  impossible  to  arouse  any 
enthusiasm  for  our  spoken  language  in  a  French 
man,  for  he  does  not  believe  that  conversation  in 
his  sense  of  the  word  is  ever  carried  on  in  it. 
And  he  is  certainly  right.  The  range  of  a  quite 
ordinary  Frenchman's  every-day  talk  is  not  gen 
erally  permitted  in  this  country.  Religion  may 
be  discussed  with  a  French  chauffeur  on  a  footing 


OUR  REFINEMENT  229 

of  naturalness  absolutely  out  of  place  at  an 
American  authors'  club.  You  may  confess  a 
literary  taste  to  a  French  washwoman,  but  not  to 
a  New  York  banker.  The  philosophic  specula 
tions  of  French  barber  shops  would  be  shockingly 
pedantic  at  our  dinner  tables. 

Of  course  the  main  reason  why  the  conversa 
tion  of  a  novelist  does  not  differ  from  that  of  a 
shoe  manufacturer  is  simply  because  as  a  rule 
there  is  no  real  difference  between  them.  But 
there  is  sometimes  another  side  to  it.  The  man 
of  letters  who  excludes  letters  from  his  talk  is 
not  necessarily  ashamed  of  them.  But  he  knows 
the  traditional  association  in  this  country  of 
culture  with  ennui,  and  he  knows  that  it  is  amply 
justified.  Acquaintance  with  the  personalities  of 
cultured  groups  naturally  disposes  a  sensitive 
mind  to  the  cultivation  of  an  appearance  of 
illiteracy.  Thought  is  not  a  social  nuisance  in 
this  country,  but  thinkers  generally  are.  Hence, 
when  seized  by  an  irresistible  impulse  to  express 
any  sort  of  an  idea,  a  well-bred  man  will  always 
leave  the  room,  just  as  he  would  do  if  seized  by 
an  uncontrollable  fit  of  coughing. 


AND     TO     Sf  n 

S'-°°    °N 


TC  .  SO  «NT8  ON  T» 

CENTS  °N  THE  FOURTH 


DEC  27  193 

OCT     5    1936 
FEB   41937 


5  1939 


FEB5 


SEVENTH     DAY 


' 


LD  21-50?/i-8,.32 


tfftl-7 
MAY   6192 


Cc 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


